Return to the Dialogue

The Dialogue between Consciousness and the Universe takes an unexpected turn as it is reframed within the context of a multiverse. Should the Dialogue be grounded in facts or in truth? In truth, this search will never end. It may progress, stall, regress, persist. It carries its own transcendence in the form of a theory that faces great contradictions. In its attempt to predict how things are and why, it holds onto patterns of invariance with the goal to reveal something from within dominates or something from without supersedes. What sort of a thing these Universe’s shores are comes down to a mere suggestion. 

Just that words like absence and nothingness have a ring to them. They signify that something lies beneath the surface of things that poets, painters, and composers alike allude to with verses, brushes, and musical notes and to which they give tangibility in a moment of inspiration. 

Scattered on a blank page like stars in the sky, words not only bear witness to the evolution of consciousness, they play their part in the process of actualization. If a poet could speak the language of geometry, she would describe nothingness as unity in darkness, a plunging circle into eternity, a well falling into infinity. Words fall like snowflakes onto the Earth’s surface. What remains is the same intent dressed up into a system aimed at framing a theory of everything. 

Buried under piles of words, nothingness is shaped like intervals forever removed from what is, has passed, and will be. The feeling left by its disappearing act lingers as forms bear the enduring absence. Yet, nothingness is a perpetually felt presence within and out of every entity. It coexists as a fundamental element of evolution in the process of the formless and the accidental, hides in plain sight in the splits and folds of spacetime, and in the molecular geometry, the expansion of distances, the fundamental interactions as superposition states disentangle and disseminate.

As the story goes, the Questioner threads seven beads onto a string. The beads create a necklace that transforms into a chain of nine rings. Their free expression carry them like waves on water. Pieced together from ontological fragments and woven connections, the figure stands upright, shaped like Burnham’s star queen. The Questioner gives it the freedom to exist. The evolving character turns into a dancer twirling around an axis of loops that nurture the genesis of things and preserve, in a fragile balance, matter and energy. 

Circles, loops, and bubbles channel information, shrinking and growing, dispersing and reforming. The figure has entered the scene in the Woods of the Universe. The Questioner calls it the Acrobat. They, both, believe to be the shadow of the other. The distance between them is zero, yet the Acrobat that takes the form of a presence rifts apart from the Questioner whose own consciousness struggles to establish itself in itself.

Formed from concept-bubbles, the Acrobat bears on its shoulders the weight of these shores and juggles existential balls and ontic clubs, hoping to give meaning to its parts. The thoracic bubble of freedom, essence, and existence envelops its heart. Those of beauty and melody, and of sensation of space and emotion of time, hang from its hips and knees. The silent tinkling of nothingness occupies its head, while the universal melody translates into frequencies down to its feet. Beauty is what gives sound waves freedom to be in harmony. 

 Words, like birds chirping and ground crackling, build the resonant walls of the house of everything where the Acrobat is setting up its home. Through the windows, it throws ropes around a balloon of dark energy, pulling and releasing it at will. In the submerging sea of words, energy applies to diverse processes. 

Most of the internal energy of ordinary objects— the rest mass —is stored in the labyrinth of proton and neutron particles. The vacuum energy is the information with no name that spreads through the Acrobat’s bubbles. Placed in its chest, it may be the hidden essence that, along with existence, is preceded by freedom rising from Nothingness. Yet, space that fills its belly already suggests the implicit existence of a dark energy of remarkably low density. 

In practical terms, the next logical step is to situate nothingness in relation to dark energy. Informational dark energy is pictured, in the mind’s eye, both as a standalone balloon that balances out the odd arrangement of the Acrobat’s bubbles and as a chameleon-like entity that spreads through its body. It is a necessary element of existence within the multiverse. Is one equal to the other? Fearing the collapse of its parts, the Acrobat scratches its head which resonates in a silent ringing and relays to the Questioner that Nothingness is invariance moving in harmony like a chorus, a repeated hum. 

It climbs into the rafters of the house of everything from which swirling plumes of time, nothingness, and quanta rise to recombine within the multiverse. There, on a roof beam, the code of a pre-existing order is carved in the language of absence, that says : “there is no agency without space, no sentience without time, no consciousness without gravity.” 

The Questioner dwells on the wider meaning of time domain. Nothingness is the negative state, a bit like what sculptors call 'negative space', in the absence of the four temporal components of time (what is, has passed, will be, and is always in the state of becoming). The hypothesis that it is a mode of temporality beyond spacetime leads to its definition as the temporal strata of the multiverse. Are those temporal strata scissionned by dark energy? 

“Time is a subjective experience.” The Acrobat whispers to the Questioner’s ear. A thread of open communication connects them to each other. “It differs, fragments, recedes, and accelerates. It drips, slips away and disappears into intervals that fold into layers of the multiverse. Its arrows, like spokes of a wheel, spring randomly from  the rhizomatic Nothingness. Nothing is what it appears to be. Even the profile view of this universal plane is but an imperfect rhizomatic line between the field of existence and Nothingness.” 

Nowadays, though, time gives the Questioner the unsettling impression that it moves backward. From the Abbey of Beaugency to the Hospices of Beaune, from Cluny to Cîteaux, she finds herself in the young monk’s place before the rows of empty chairs on which phantom objects and spectral entities are seated. She tells them what she has understood sofar: “It is not the movement toward being that is transcendence,  but the movement toward nothingness.” Her mind pushes open the door of her cell. 

Between water, pond, and forest, she engages in an internal Dialogue with the Acrobat. Its ethereal nature is intrinsically linked to the nothingness that haunts the Questioner. It is a co-creation of all the phantom objects and spectral entities that transmit keys of communication to posterity. It is an esoteric code, a transient entity, the voice of a theory as light as a cirrus cloud. 

Like a drunken boat, the Questioner wanders around lakes, along rivers and canals, on the bay shore and ocean coast. Among migratory birds, the great egret stands, solitary, in the muddy stream while other egrets find refuge on an island in the riverbed. Bald eagles yelp and soar above the waters flowing into the ocean where sea lions blow bubbles, dolphins whistle, and rays fly underwater. From the cosmic sky to the bottom of the oceans, surely time feels different, except for the graveyard of fallen trees. 

The Questioner no longer perceives a difference between shapes of nebulae and supernova remnants and those of jellyfish and translucent squids, nor does she distinguishes the deep fissures of the Grand Canyon from those of the Zambezi River. From the beaches of Nantucket to the hills of Sancerre, the state of being conscious is a feeling, an intimate sense of belonging that transcends objects and entities by incorporating elements drawn randomly from one event to the next so that they can be inner parts of  those objects and entities as outlined in the following: 

While Nothingness and the Quantum Universe occupy the Acrobat’s head, three red dots invite themselves unexpectedly. They are manifestations of time itself, that is LBCA (the Last Bacterial Common Ancestor), LACA (the Last Archean Common Ancestor), and LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor). LUCA, for whom time undoubtedly flows differently, is a 4.2-billion-year-old thermophilic anaerobe. It has passed the word to LBCA and LACA, its closest relatives. They arrive, delighted to find themselves on the Acrobat's head. A series of exchanges unfold between them and their host. With its new features as conduits of feeling, the Acrobat becomes increasingly aware of what it feels like to be others. It has become a community. With its newly acquired mouth, it declares proudly:

“There is no 'I' in 'I,' but 'we,' whether it be genetic, ancestral, spiritual, or based on proximity. The 'I,' how imposing its presence appears, will never erase all that was, is, and will be.”

The three life companions could not agree more and say: “We are reflections in the mirror of the early universe’s red dots with an eccentric V-shaped appearance like two lines joining eyes to the mouth. The problem with existence is that it is plagued with a fundamental fear. The evolution of consciousness can’t mask a deep sense of nobodyness — the existential experience of nothingness.”

The multitime properties of the multiverse allow for waves of resonance to cross over from end to end in such a way as to constitute the rhizome of Nothingness where there is no pre no post and where the mirroring dance has no starting point.

Why, then, would the Acrobat engage in the infinite game called Chaos and Nothingness with the Universe? Square one marks the Quantum realm. While no direction has yet been chosen, it allows for the release of an energy it doesn’t appear to have. There, a feeling of being in multiple quantum states coincides with a feeling of not being in any. 

From square one of the board game, a step back leads to pre-quantum pre-spacetime. A step forward,  primordial asymmetries and fundamental processes bring about chance existence and energy fluctuations. However, in the multiverse, a pre-quantum pre-spacetime domain should model after the pre-existing order as another universe defined by its own chance existence and energy fluctuations. 

Motion and communication set time directionality and causal relations, making dynamic histories dependent upon initial conditions. What, then, determines their historicity when, out of infinitely many ontologically indeterminate splittings, a few only persist and evolve on these universe’s shores? All arise from a deeper level as quantum chaotic systems decohere or fragmentate, and no longer exist in a superposition state. While evolution takes complex systems on, or in the ordered regime near the edge of chaos, quantum chaos entails that the interaction of particles may, in some cases, randomize rapidly and create patterns of unitary evolution. The two chaos are diametrically different, separated by their respective histories. Still they mirror each other.

In the multiverse that makes up the sum of all histories with echoing events, the conservation of ontology points to the retention of a geometric memory of a deep resonance, so deep that a black hole has its interior causally connected from its exterior and that events, grouped and regrouped, randomly wash ashore.

After a few rounds of the game, the universe draws closer to the edge of a transitional chaos that may decide whether consciousness grows new bonds of sympathy. By the rules of the game, winning conditions are triggered by achieving the highest level of consciousness, known as the togetherness of being. 

The Acrobat manages to flee from the Questioner to the point of its very own evanescence. Catapulted into a higher dimension, it journeys through the noosphere. Its disembodied self watches its parts drifting away along the path toward the three circles of dance. Its rolling head emerges from slumber and swears it dreamed of what sort of a thing the highest consciousness is. Words, though, freeze in its mouth. All what it is left with is an inexpressible feeling — a subtle resonance.

In the end, it regrets the scattering of its parts. Each has its own raison d’être, after all. So it regains its complete form, but not quite with the same arrangement and color. Its nine parts have moved around a bit as if they were the Earth's tectonic plates. The bubbles' escape and rearrangement have proved that motion isn’t just a question of distance and communication isn’t just a question of information.

The blue Acrobat, joyfully, wiggles its feet, one anchored in light, sound, and water, and the other ascending and descending the levels of consciousness. Nonetheless, it is utterly aware that the growth  of consciousness runs counter to the general tendency of all things to gravitate toward chaos as the stampede scene, currently taking place at its feet, shows. 

For the Questioner who once searched for a glimpse of consciousness in the force-carrying bosons, it remains an open question whether the emergence of consciousness is dependent upon the influx of photons into atoms. Light is absorbed photon by photon, likewise each event is experienced in a unidimensional manner. With light, consciousness expands. It is a network resonance that utilizes all what it is at its disposal from black holes from which trapped quantum information is ready to be released to waves, fields, and clouds.

With a blueprint in its hand, the Acrobat goes off to open fields and mirror lakes with the ease of a great egret. It is on a mission to build its authentic self. There is still a probability of change in its agency.

All things considered, it doesn't want to be human or any other living form than its own. It chooses to simply be what it is, an evolving figure assembled by chance in midst of a multiverse.

As the Questioner returns to the Dialogue, the Acrobat remains a spatial metaphor on the reader’s screen. To enact change, words and concepts transpose themselves from one field to the next.

Notes:

1. Barfield, O. (1926). History in English Words. United Kingdom: Methuen & Company Limited
2. “…what we call theory of everything was yesterday a theory of harmony whose goal was to combine mathematics, geometry, music, astronomy, and philosophy. The growing knowledge of our ever-expanding spatiotemporal surroundings has, continually, shifted the focus of our attention, but our intent remains the same.” Cosmic Harmony
3. Balzac, H. d. (1837). Illusions perdues. Belgium: Société Belge de Librairie.
4. Sartre, Being and Nothingness
5. “The introducing sentence 亙先無有 of the bamboo manuscript sets the stage for events prior to the formation of the Earth-Moon system and before the Sun came out of a nebula cloud of dust and gas. Some scholars chose to translate it two ways: “In the Constancy, there is first no existence” or constancy “preceded the absence of Being”. Others believe that the two characters 亙先 have to do with the ‘origin of origins’, the ‘absolute primordiality’, the ‘ultimate commencement’ as a reference to the Great Ultimate 大極. Perhaps both interpretations —constancy and an ultimate beginning — do not contradict each other and point to an ultimate state of invariance.” Crossover
6. “Un a produit deux; deux a produit trois; trois a produit les dix mille êtres. Les dix mille êtres se retournent de l’element Yin et embrassent l'élément Yang.  Le souffle vide en fait un mélange harmonieux 沖氣以為和.” Le Livre de la voie et de la vertu, JJL Duyvendak, 1981
7. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux
8. Vasily Kokorev et al 2024 ApJ 968 38. María Carranza-Escudero et al 2025 ApJL 989 L50
9. Martin Luther King, Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community? (1968, Beacon Press)
10. Strasberg, Philipp, Teresa E. Reinhard, and Joseph Schindler. "First principles numerical demonstration of emergent decoherent histories." Physical Review X 14.4 (2024): 041027
11. Stephen L Adler 2012 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 361 012002
12. Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 90
13. Adler, Stephen L. "Trace dynamics and its implications for my work of the last two decades." arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.14524 (2023)