Motion and Communication

Taking the roads less traveled, the little acrobat goes on reading a book by Ed Yong, The Immense World. Communication alters perception — both its own and that of others. Every uttered thought, written word, and encounter it has shapes the Dialogue between the Universe and Consciousness. Upstream, the slow-moving bird continues its solitary existence. Downstream, more great egrets have found safe haven on an island off the shore as bald eagles in pairs fly in and out over the river, diving to catch fish. If a bald eagle makes a sound, regardless of whether it’s saying something, what does the silence of the great egret amount to when it flies off gracefully above the water? Even its quiet motion conveys a message.

As the Sun dips below the horizon in the West, the little acrobat goes on surfing gravitational waves, gliding through molecular clouds before slipping into the hollowness of a black hole. Could black holes be producing magnetic field seeds like trapped quantum information poised to be released? As much as it had in the past marveled at the great egret, it feels an even greater fulfillment, sensing magnetic fields beyond galaxy clusters — in gaseous filaments, underdense voids, and intercluster bridges. 

Unnumbered individual things, seemingly all alike and all unchangeable play hide-and-seek in the Quantum Universe where there are no strands of personal order until differences in their nature, configuration and motion unfold. Above the surface, no event ever happens more than once, James Clerk Maxwell noted in Matter and Motion. The essence though isn’t lost even as initial quantum sparks do not survive. 

Time is the ability of the ontological condition to endure, but its innate porosity ultimately does not allow it to do so on an individual level. Collectively, the essence subsists in the process of becoming. It extends in strings of resonance. All the time passing on those roads, the little acrobat holds onto the awkward yet insightful words by Whitehead in its heart, that a ‘feeling’ is the appropriation of elements to be components in the internal constitution of actual objects. Those multilayered components highlight differences between one event and another in the nature, configuration, and motion of the objects concerned.

It scatters seeds along its path to help retrace its steps and backtracks a bit reminiscing its encounter with the Time Mind and their discussion about initial magnetic seeds. Energy fields exist on all scales. Rotating and drifting plasma generate electric currents, which in turn produce and amplify magnetic fields. Fields travel to the edges of galaxies and, on even larger scales, to the distant intracluster regions. 

Self-generated fields in constant fluctuation act upon each other, with feedback from supernovae that blow out matter and cosmic winds driven by star formation. Inflows and outflows proceed directly and indirectly like the underground networks of a forest. These motions participate in the swapping of ‘feelings’ through galaxy clusters and across space and time. Realists may argue that space is not a conducive medium like the sea. In fact, it is an even greater insulator than air. But in the air, poets would contend, flowers sticking their heads out hold on to their invisible electric halos. Pollen flies, leaping from flowers onto bees, even before they land. From the air, migrating birds sense the weak magnetic field of the Earth. 

Traveling asteroids and roaming plasma carry the hidden message of their original sources. What happens when the magnetic moment of a celestial body reacts to the magnetic field tied to a star, and when an asteroid is accreted by a magnetized white dwarf, does it compare to an electric fish buzzing signals to other fishes with its electric field? If magnetism, electricity — and, to a larger extent, gravitation — are affections of the same substance, the necessary condition for the existence of such a substance is its ubiquitous extension. 

If whatever moves is something that feels, motion is its way of communicating. Like an electric fish using the same discharges for navigation and communication, there is a universal language that sees no distinction between navigation and communication. Navigation however implies a volitional act, in the same way we asked before whether stars’ motion is deliberate. The term ‘motion’ might be more neutral, leaving aside any volitional theory of causation. 

Are all things just moving, or are they navigating in any given medium — whether in space, air, or water? In the search for cosmic consciousness, the little acrobat gets down to brass tacks: time invites motion and motion is a form of expression, independently of the data collected by the human mind. Stars do not need eyes to sense light from afar and that which they self produce. Their fields are clouds of thoughts, limbs of action. To the little acrobat, a dweller of the Boundary, motion equals what it holds in its bubble-shaped hand — distance, mass, and electric force — while communication encompasses one of its core bubbles — entropy, energy, and information. Indeed all its bubbles have a purpose. It just needs to hold onto them a little while longer.

Whether celestial bodies passively detect other fields, actively open lines of communication, and sense their own self-made fields, such a sense may be fragile — lost and regained across time and space. Like electroreceptors that operate in both passive and active modes, and magnetoreceptors that are buried deep and elusive, such a sense reveals a deep-seated awareness of the Dialogue. Six hundred million years ago, the common ancestor of all living vertebrates almost certainly had an electric sense. These electric senses, which might also function as magnetic senses, appear, disappear, and reappear, branching off from each other.

Like the Great Egret, the little acrobat goes on exploring new fishing grounds. “How does it feel to breathe in unison with trees, oceans, the Earth, and the Sun?”  — that was its initial intent to find out. But in the end, it gives up on being human or any other living being for that matter. It chooses instead to exist on a larger scale, unafraid of burning its invisible wings.  To the Questioner who has become a mere shadow by its side, it says: “Six years down those roads, haven’t you understood anything? No, information is not the primary link between Consciousness and the Universe. The link is a feeling, an intimate sense of belonging.” 

As it navigates through the Universe, the internal and external relations woven by spacetime are its field of investigation. It grasps at distance something from without… from somewhere outside the world of stars. It is swayed by James Clerk Maxwell’s belief that the Universe is fed from moment to moment by an agency external to itself,  tucked away in other parts of the Multiverse or in the dark sector where the universal organism plans its every step behind the scenes, or even in the togetherness of the rhizomatic Nothingness and the Quantum Universe from which Chance arises. 

Chance has it that electric and magnetic fields perform a self-regulating dance, leaving enough time and space for ecological and biological processes to niche within irregular steps of stability levels. Molecules and proteins, formed and enriched by these processes, produce an ever-expanding array of fields varying in size, some significantly fainter than others. Chance — the extensional criterion — holds unto its essential qualities of freedom, essence, and existence.

In the world of stars, pollen-like particles seemingly fly and leap from body to body. Bee-like things gather, transport, and transfer encoded information through magnetic fields, along gravitational waves, from pulsars, magnetars, and galaxies whose combined radiation they emit generates and reinforces the magnetic force. Motion transmits signals. Diffuse radio emissions produced from electrons spinning in magnetic fields provide information on the formation and evolution of the cosmic web across time and space while low radio frequencies uncover old remnant sources. Whether magnetic, electric, or gravitational, the Universe is full of vibrational signals. In the Impossible Sea, they are all talking, in choir or solo, of objects buzzing and feeling near and far.

James Clerk Maxwell,  Matter and Motion

James Clerk Maxwell, The Dynamical Theory Of The Electromagnetic Field

James Clerk Maxwell, A treatise on Electricity and Magnetism

Ed Yong,  An immense world

Matt Strassler, Waves in an impossible sea