Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Universal Consciousness

We are well aware of the idea that life constantly evolves. But how far does this process of evolution go? Does it stop at life, or could it be argued that evolution is a property of the cosmos?For instance, if the universe began from a Big Bang, and has constantly changed from this point, does this show the property of evolution? And could a similar argument be laid down for known, and constant, change upon planet Earth?

LIFE AND EARTH

The fundamental problem with the idea that planet Earth evolves concerns the place of life within the evolutionary process. Does life evolve separate to the planet, or is life - including mankind - part of the process of Earth’s evolutionary mechanism?

To accept the latter holds severe problems for science. It not only removes us from the top of the evolutionary tree, but would suggest a form of co-ordinated intelligence invested in planet Earth which is guiding us along.There are, infact, many indicators that this is, indeed, the case. One of the absolutes of evolution is the idea that evolution only evolves what is required for survival. There is no surplus.

However, the massive explosion in the size of the human brain goes way ahead of our ability to use it. Our brain capacity is far greater than is required by this evolutionary law. Yet if seen as part of an evolving requirement of planet Earth, our brain size could fall into the evolutionary pattern.

COLLECTIVE PHILOSOPHIES

French philosopher Henri Bergson would have had no problem with this idea. He believed that nature had an urge to create - a principle he called the ‘elan vital’. Such an urge would be above an individual species, placing all of nature within an evolutionary concept which could easily be seen as part of the evolution of planet Earth.British physicist Peter Russell could have placed our big brain within this format.

He theorised upon a growing planetary level of consciousness called the ‘Gaiafield’ - a self-reflective consciousness of all minds, forming a social superorganism.In a way this is similar to psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious lying under the personal mind. But instead of being a species supermind, Russell would invest the property on a planetary level.

THE QUANTUM EFFECT

A big stumbling block to such ideas concerns the extent to which consciousness exists in nature. The suggestion is made that consciousness is a fundamental property of, not only nature, but the universe at large - in effect, a higher intelligence exists.Yet quantum theory seems to be hinting that such a consciousness may well be out there.

For instance, quantum reality is probabilistic. In its natural state, a particle can be said to be in any position possible.An exact reality is only known through observation by an intelligence capable of understanding it. Hence, for a reality to exist, it must be created through observation. Hence, a form of consciousness must exist for reality to come into existence.And seeing the reality of a physical universe existed before life entered the cosmos, consciousness must be a property of that cosmos.

UNIVERSAL MIND

If such an evolving universal intelligence does exist, then it is fair to say that the investing of consciousness in life is a recent development of consciousness. As such, human consciousness can be seen to be towards the lower level of consciousness.But placed in terms of an evolving cosmos, it can equally be argued that it is our place to evolve into a more universal mind.Such an idea was proposed by Catholic mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. To him, life evolved towards an Omega Point, or completion.

When life had evolved to this point, the Omega Point would move forwards.Hence, we constantly evolve in stages. The Omega Point presently lies at the creation of the ‘noosphere’, which can be described as a planetisation of the mind. This would cause ‘noogenesis’, and the creation of a planetary consciousness.

WORLD IN HARMONY

To achieve such a planetary mind, life and the physical characteristics of the planet would have to work in unison. And such an idea was put forward in 1958 by theorist Alfred Redfield, who noted that the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans seemed to be biologically controlled.However, it wasn’t until 1979, and the publication of ‘Gaia: A New Look At Life On Earth’, that James Lovelock took the idea to its ultimate expression.

Lovelock, a British biologist, formulated the Gaia Hypothesis whilst working on equipment designed to find life on Mars for NASA.Gaia, a survival of the ancient Mother Goddess, was adopted by the ancient Greeks, and was the mother of Zeus, who was allowed to rule only on her consent. Hence, it was the perfect name to give to what in effect became an Earth entity.

For to Lovelock, Earth is an overall biosphere organism, where life on Earth makes a contribution to the regulation of the planet. The atmosphere and the biosphere (life) conspire in a form of symbiosis to produce a self-regulatory mechanism which makes life possible, with even the oceans and crust falling into evolutionary line.The obvious continuation of the Gala Hypothesis is to argue that planet Earth is conscious, and in seeing itself through our space cameras it has become aware.

But of course there is no way of testing such ideas, for to test a system, it must be tested from outside. And at present, we cannot do this.

THE BIG STORY

In a philosophical sense, we can argue the validity of the hypothesis. Knowledge throughout history has been the product of culture. Within the scope of knowledge we place the hopes and aspirations of the people.

This was easily identified within religious knowledge, where knowledge of deities was very much an expression of the social mood. It is not so easy to identify in science, but it is still there, for science is an expression of our belief in our superior intellect.It does not matter whether planetary consciousness exists or not.

What is important is to see if such consciousness can be seen as analogous to our history, our present, and where we see the future as going.American historian Thomas Berry understood this point. Every culture has to have a spiritual ethic in order to bring people together and make them whole. And this requirement still exists, even in an apparently secular world.And Berry realised that we need, in effect, a ‘new story’; a form of creation myth for the planet, imbued with meaning and expression.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell thought likewise. In an increasingly connected global village, a new planetary mythology would be needed, seeing the world as a whole, and above nations and their cultures. So can such a mythology be constructed to take all these points into account? Perhaps it can.

LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

One vital point of evolution is that every lifeform evolved the ability to communicate. To what degree of sophistication this goes on we are not sure, but there is no doubt that purposive communication takes place.

Man also communicates - and without the need for words.

We have an instinctual language we can all understand. Fear, love, hunger, happiness and the need for procreation can all be communicated through mannerisms and subliminal means.And the strange thing is, this is the only language we need for survival. The spoken word is surplus to evolution.

Complex spoken language seems to be an idiosyncracy of a species that routinely deals in abstracts which have no intrinsic survival value.

Yet, if evolution has any validity, our species drive to complex communicative skill must have some purpose.

Applying the rules of evolution, it is possible to argue that it is the evolutionary purpose of mankind to consciously understand the purpose and mechanics of communication. And this can certainly be seen in our impulse towards high technology, which is primarily geared towards communicative skills.We are presently, and increasingly, talking to ourselves, other species and the stars.

We are, in effect, becoming global chatterboxes. And interestingly, communication causes abstracts, and abstract ideas require increasingly complex information-processing equipment to understand them.And nothing is more complex for this purpose than our evolved big brain.

Evolution has given us the most complex information-processing equipment available, suggesting we are evolving ever more complex communicative skills for an evolutionary purpose.

ONE ORGANISM

If this process continues, the day is not far away when, through us, the whole planet will speak as a single voice. Indeed, all that stands between us and its realisation are the dying dreams of Empire and the violence they engender.

Basically, our present technological impulses are leading us to bring the planet together as a single communicative organism with man as its mouthpiece. And in increasing our communicative skills we are also realising our interdependence with the whole ecology of planet Earth.

Basically, the ecological movement is leading us back to symbiosis. Man, nature, and the planet we all inhabit are coming together, and coming together through our custodianship.

THE END OF FRAGMENTATION?

Unconsciously this coming together has been gaining ground throughout our recent history. Of course, many would argue that this is wrong. Rather, recent history has been the epitome of violent fragmentation.Even now ethnic and national minorities seem to be striving to return mankind to tribalism.

However, could this be part of a process that will inevitably result in planetary consciousness? Just look a little closer at what has been happening.In the past, despots have risen and imposed themselves upon the world with little or no opposition. Empire builders have still risen in modern history, but are increasingly unlikely to get away with it. As soon as a despot tries to export hIs despotism outside his own country, free nations are increasingly likely to band together to say no.

This was the reality of the two world wars, of Korea, of the Falklands, and of the original 1990 Gulf War, leading logically to the armed forces as peacekeeper in nations such as Bosnia.This is where an increasing amount of violence within modern warfare has come from - not to conquer, but to liberate - no matter how ill defined and poorly understood those motives might have been at the time.

Certainly there are still problems - we are a long way from being perfect - but the principle is there are gaining ground.

A BRAVE NEW WORLD

Increasingly, and perhaps unconsciously, our species is coming together to uphold individual and group freedoms in the species and in nature in a way unthought of in preceding centuries.In the future, I suggest, this principle of denying despotism - of whatever kind - the facility to freely operate will grow until despots will be unable to rise to power at all.

And in conjunction with a growing ecological consciousness that is teaching us that planet Earth is one and an interdependent life support system, the principle outlined could well be the first indication that we are leaving our barbaric past behind and moving towards a true planetary consciousness. But where will this leave us?

As far as we are aware, we are the only lifeform on planet Earth that has so far attempted communication beyond the planet. But to do so we had to evolve the hard way, learning to understand barbarism and the need for possessions.It was possessions that grounded our advancement in the physical and the material; it was barbarism and fragmentation that eventually led to the impulse to communicate to bring ourselves together again.

And the two evolved towards the ‘physical’ need to communicate.And our advancement to the attainment of high technology communicative skills is suddenly the answer to the question posed by philosophers down the centuries - why are we here? We are here to aid planet Earth in its attempt to become cosmically conscious. But then again, perhaps more than even this.

DESTINATION, THE STARS

Man has begun to learn the value of ecological co-operation at the same time that his technology has reached the stage of seriously contemplating the idea of space travel. Already systems are on the drawing board that could transport us to the stars.Certainly it would not be travel as seen in Star Trek, but ideas concerning generation starships and the Ramscoop, not to mention the ion drive, take star travel away from science fiction and place it in the realms of scientific possibility.

Except for one problem. Evolution evolves only what is required. There is no surplus. And it is now becoming apparent to those who envisage star travel that nothing less than the entire resources and co-operation of mankind would be required to turn it into a real possibility.

The coming together of so many factors can be seen as the root of a new mythology for the Space Age, combining the past, present and future into a new meaning and direction for mankind.Ecological awareness, realisation of the errors of our barbarism, increasing high technology communicative abilities and the realisation of star travel are all coming upon us together, shaping our destiny for the future.

Perhaps we do have purpose after all; and that purpose is to aid planet Earth in becoming a conscious organism and exporting awareness to the stars. And is it not strange that this is only achieveable by man coming together in co-operation with each other and nature?

Basically, to export ourselves, we can only do it when we come to peace with ourselves. And if this is so, we can look forward to a beautiful, exciting and rewarding future.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Homunculus Argument

The homunculus argument arises most commonly in the theory of vision. One may explain (human) vision by arguing that the light from the outside world forms an image on the retinas in the eyes and something (or some'one') in the brain looks at these images as if they are images on a movie screen (this theory of vision is sometimes termed the theory of the Cartesian Theater: it is most associated, nowadays, with the psychologist David Marr).

But the question is: 'who' is it who is looking at this 'internal' movie inside the brain? The assumption here (although this is rarely made explicit) is that there is a 'little man' or 'homunculus' inside the brain 'looking at' this movie. (Alternatively it might be proposed that the images on the retinas are transferred to the visual cortex where it is scanned. But here again, all that has been done is to place a homunculus in the brain behind the cortex.)

The reason why this is a fallacy is that an obvious problem then presents itself: how does the homunculus 'see' this internal movie? The obvious answer is that there is another homunculus inside the first homunculus's 'head' or 'brain' looking at this 'movie'. But how does this homunculus see the 'outside world'?

In order to answer this, we are forced to posit another homunculus inside this other homunculus's head and so forth. In other words, we are in a situation of infinite regress.

This is always a sure sign that an argument has gone wrong. (Another way of putting this is to say that the homunculus argument accounts for a phenomenon in terms of the very phenomenon that it is supposed to explain--that is, homuncular arguments are fallacious for the same reason that a recipe for cake that had, as one of its ingredients, 'cake' is not a real (explanatory) recipe).

Another example is with cognitivist theories that argue that the human brain uses 'rules' to carry out operations (these rules often conceptualised as being like the algorithms of a computer program).

For example, in his work of the '50s, '60s and '70s Noam Chomsky argued that (in the words of one of his books) human beings use Rules and Representations (or to be more specific, rules acting on representations) in order to cognise (more recently Chomsky has abandoned this view: c.f. the Minimalist Program).

Now, in terms of (say) chess, the players are given 'rules' (i.e. the rules of chess) to follow. So: who uses these rules?

The answer is self-evident: the players of the game (of chess) use the rules: it's not the case (obviously) that the rules themselves play chess.

The rules themselves are merely inert marks on paper until a human being reads, understands and uses them. But what about the 'rules' that are, allegedly, inside our head (brain)?

Who reads, understands and uses them? Again, the implicit answer is (and, some would argue, must be) a 'homunculus': a little man who reads the rules and then gives orders to the body to act on them.

But again we are in a situation of infinite regress, because this implies that the homunculus has cognitive process that are also rule bound, which presupposes another homunculus inside its head, and so on and so forth.

Therefore, so the argument goes, theories of mind that imply or state explicitly that cognition is rule bound cannot be correct unless some way is found to 'ground' the regress.

This is important because it is often assumed in cognitive science that rules and algorithms are essentially the same: in other words, the theory that cognition is rule bound is often believed to imply that thought (cognition) is essentially, the manipulation of algorithms, and this is one of the key assumptions of some varieties of artificial intelligence.

Homunculus arguments are always fallacious unless some way can be found to 'ground' the regress. In the psychology and philosophy of mind, 'homunculus arguments' (or the 'homunculus fallacies') are extremely useful for detecting where theories of mind fail or are incomplete.

The Homunculus fallacy is closely related to Ryle's Regress.

A possible counter to this is that the brain as a whole is the homunculus, rather than thinking a specific part must be watching the movie.

Monday, January 7, 2008

Is Time slowing down & disappearing from the Universe?

Remember a little thing called the space-time continuum? Well what if the time part of the equation was literally running out? New evidence is suggesting that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. This radical new theory may explain a cosmological mystery that has baffled scientists for years.

Scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the universe ages. Physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-gravitational force must be driving the galaxies apart, and started to call this unidentified force "dark energy".

However, to this day no one actually knows what dark energy is, or where it comes from. Professor Jose Senovilla, and his colleagues at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, have proposed a mind-bending alternative. They propose that there is no such thing as dark energy at all, and we’re looking at things backwards. Senovilla proposes that we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down.

At an everyday level, the change would not be perceptible. However, it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years. The change would be infinitesimally slow from a human perspective, but in terms of the vast perspective of cosmology, the study of ancient light from suns that shone billions of years ago, it could easily be measured.

The team's proposal, which will be published in the journal Physical Review D, dismisses dark energy as fiction. Instead, Prof Senovilla says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock with a run-down battery.

“We do not say that the expansion of the universe itself is an illusion," he explains. "What we say it may be an illusion is the acceleration of this expansion - that is, the possibility that the expansion is, and has been, increasing its rate."

If time gradually slows "but we naively kept using our equations to derive the changes of the expansion with respect of 'a standard flow of time', then the simple models that we have constructed in our paper show that an "effective accelerated rate of the expansion" takes place."
Currently, astronomers are able to discern the expansion speed of the universe using the so-called "red shift" technique. This technique relies on the understanding that stars moving away appear redder in color than ones moving towards us. Scientists look for supernovae of certain types that provide a sort of benchmark.

However, the accuracy of these measurements depends on time remaining invariable throughout the universe. If time is slowing down, according to this new theory, our solitary time dimension is slowly turning into a new space dimension. Therefore the far-distant, ancient stars seen by cosmologists would from our perspective, look as though they were accelerating.

"Our calculations show that we would think that the expansion of the universe is accelerating," says Prof Senovilla. The theory bases it’s idea on one particular variant of superstring theory, in which our universe is confined to the surface of a membrane, or brane, floating in a higher-dimensional space, known as the "bulk". In billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether.

"Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever," Senovilla told New Scientist magazine. "Our planet will be long gone by then."

Though radical and in many way unprecedented, these ideas are not without support. Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, say the concept has merit. "We believe that time emerged during the Big Bang, and if time can emerge, it can also disappear - that's just the reverse effect."

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Plasma Life Forms - Dark Panspermia

The Meteoric Rise of Life on Earth

One of the goals of astrobiology is to understand how life on Earth began. 2,500 years ago, Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher, proposed a hypothesis called "panspermia" (Greek for "all seeds") which posited that all life, and indeed all things, originated from the combination of tiny seeds pervading the cosmos.

Astrobiologists at NASA and elsewhere are now seriously considering the possibility that life on Earth originated outside the planet and was brought into it by space debris impacting its surface over vast stretches of time. Recent discoveries are lending increasing support to the hypothesis of panspermia.

Researchers discovered a meteorite from Mars that was cool enough in its core when it reached Earth to support life-forms such as bacteria. Another group succeeded in reviving bacteria more than 250 million years old. In 2004 the Stardust Mission discovered a range of complex hydrocarbon molecules, the building blocks for life, inside Comet Wild 2.

In 2005 the Deep Impact mission discovered a mixture of organic and clay particles inside Comet Tempel 1. NASA researchers at Johnson Space Center, Houston, discovered organic materials that formed in the most distant reaches of the early Solar System preserved in the Tagish Lake carbonaceous chondrite, a rare type of meteorite that is rich in organic (carbon-bearing) compounds.

The discovery of organic matter in meteorites is of considerable interest to scientists because the material is likely to have been formed at the dawn of the Solar System almost 4.6 billion years ago and may have seeded the early Earth with the building blocks of life. Scott Messenger, NASA space scientist, says "The organic globules most likely originated in the cold molecular cloud that gave birth to our Solar System, or at the outermost reaches of the early Solar System."

Mike Zolensky, NASA cosmic mineralogist, says "If, as we suspect, this type of meteorite has been falling onto Earth throughout its entire history, then the Earth was seeded with these organic globules at the same time life was first forming here." Presumably, all this "seeding" is still going on.

Meteorites represent primitive solar system material. Every day several hundred tons of meteoritic matter fall to Earth. Many asteroids originate from the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. Their orbits have large eccentricities and inclinations.

There is sufficient evidence that asteroids caused numerous craters to be formed on Earth when they impacted the planet's surface, including the Tunguska crater in Siberia in 1908, the Barringer meteorite crater in Arizona about 50,000 years ago and the crater north of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico 65 million years ago. Comets have elliptical orbits and take varying lengths of time to orbit the Sun - some take 3 years, others may take hundreds of thousands of years.

Millions of comets are believed to form the Oort cloud which is beyond the orbit of Neptune and half the distance to the nearest star. Hence, they may originate from the farthest reaches of the solar neighborhood.

Dark Meteorites

Dr Robert Foot of the University of Melbourne argues that some meteorites, such as the one that caused the Tunguska crater, may be composed of "mirror matter" (a component of dark matter where particles have a different parity from the particles tabulated under the physicists' Standard Model or what plasma metaphysics calls the "standard particles") and have impacted the Earth without leaving any ordinary matter fragments.

Dark Panspermia

Is it possible that the space debris that seeded life on Earth contained dark matter? If so, it will revolutionize our theories of evolution. Let's review the facts. The first thing to determine is whether it is plausible that meteorites, asteroids and comets could actually harbor dark matter.

Why some Meteorites, Asteroids and Comets could contain Dark Matter

Our galaxy's dark matter halo is believed to outweigh its visible ordinary matter by more than 20 times. While the visible galaxy (a disk) is around 120,000 light-years across and about 1,000 light years thick, the dark halo (a sphere) may extend to more than 3 times that distance, beyond 300,000 to 400,000 light years out from the galactic center. In terms of volume, therefore, the halo is much larger than the visible galaxy.

The visible galaxy will be like a thin rotating compact disc sitting in the center of a large beach ball. Most of the matter in our galaxy is therefore composed of dark matter. Only a very small proportion is composed of ordinary matter.

The Sun and its entourage are currently wading through the Local Interstellar Cloud. It entered the Cloud about 100,000 years ago (just when our early human ancestors were moving out of Africa) and is expected to remain within it for another 10,000 to 20,000 years. Leo Blitz of the University of California and David Spergel of Princeton University believe that interstellar clouds harbor dark matter.

The shape of the rotation curve of the Milky Way was found to be flat to distances beyond the edge of the Milky Way's disk. The rotation curve is plotted with the velocity of the star on one axis and its distance from the galactic center (its radius) on another axis. Measurements show that after rising from zero in the center to about 200 km/s in the inner region, the rotation curve remained fairly constant; attaining velocities of between 200 km/s and 225 km/s, up to 15 kpc from the galactic center.

The Sun is about 8.5 kpc from the galactic center and its orbital speed around the galaxy is about 220 km/s. Its orbital speed is much faster than what would be expected at that distance from the galactic center within the visible galaxy, suggesting the direct effect of dark matter on the Sun.

The density of matter in the vicinity of the Sun can be estimated by sampling a uniform population of luminous stars that extends above the disk of the galaxy. The average velocities of the stars and the vertical distances they traverse above the disk provide a measure of the gravitational force that keeps these stars within the disk.

From the strength of this force the total density of matter can be estimated. Measurements indicate that the actual number of (visible) stars accounted for only half this density. This provides further evidence that there must be dark matter in the vicinity of the Sun to eliminate the shortfall and balance-out to the measured density.

It is conceivable, therefore, that comets which travel to the far reaches of the Solar System (beyond Neptune's orbit) and then to the opposite end, near to the Sun, accumulate dark matter as they sweep through the Solar System and beyond.

Meteorites and asteroids, similarly, collect some dark matter within the Solar System, as they sweep through their orbits. We would therefore expect the Earth to be impacted by space debris containing dark matter every day.

Dark Evolution

After falling into habitable zones; meteorites, asteroids and comets, containing both the dark and visible building blocks of life, generated the first single-celled and later multi-cellular life-forms which developed both ordinary and dark matter bodies that were coupled to each other.According to plasma metaphysics, dark matter consists largely of a plasma of very high energy super particles (sometimes of a different parity) - or "dark plasma".

Due to their very high energy levels (or different parities) these particles interacted only weakly with ordinary matter (in other words, there are only subtle interactions between the ordinary and dark matter bodies) or they do not interact at all with ordinary matter at extremely high energies.

It is reasonable to assume that the lower frequency (or energy) dark matter (which can be correlated to what metaphysicists call "physical-etheric matter") would have subtle interactions with the biochemical fields within the biological body whereas the higher frequency dark matter (which can be correlated with what metaphysicists call the "astral" and other even higher energy matter) may not interact directly with ordinary matter.

Meteorites which contain dark plasma generated the first bioplasma cells which were the precursors to the biochemical cells (as argued by Erzilia Lozneanu and Mircea Sanduloviciu of Cuza University in 2003; and inferred by V N Tsytovich and his colleagues of the Russian Academy of Science in 2007).

It has been shown that plasma can undergo self-organization as electronic charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized. As argued by Tsytovich, the plasma cell acted as a mold or template for the formation of the biochemical cell.

This is consistent with the observation, often found in the metaphysical literature (for example Barbara Brennan and others), that the subtle bioplasma body provides the template for the morphogenesis of the biochemical body in 3+1 dimensional space.

This is also consistent with dark matter theories, which propose that dark matter provides the scaffolding for ordinary matter (as reported by Richard Massey, California Institute of Technology, and others). Physicist Chung Pei-Ma, an associate professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley, concludes that "the ghost universe of dark matter is a template for the visible universe".

While the carbon-based body was ordinarily visible, the dark matter body was invisible. It is conceivable that a series of invisible bodies, developing over a spectrum of energy levels and composed of dark matter, formed an invisible superstructure over the biological body. The higher energy bodies and the biological bodies then co-evolved as a composite during the lifetime of the carbon-based biological body.

When the biological bodies died, however, dark matter bodies continued to evolve on their own. At periodic intervals these older dark matter bodies (with accumulated memories) fused with the young dark matter counterpart bodies of embryonic biological bodies to continue their evolution with biological bodies.

The evolution of these dark matter bodies were therefore inter-twined with the evolution of biological bodies over vast stretches of time. The dark matter bodies of human beings have often been described as "subtle bodies" or "bioplasma bodies" in the metaphysical and off-mainstream scientific literature.

Role of Water is replaced by Liquid-Crystal Plasma

Liquid water is essential for biochemical life as an agent for transport and protein folding. Its high heat capacity, ability to remain a liquid over a wide temperature range and properties as a solvent ensures a stable and useful substrate for biochemical activities. Its importance, however, is relative to biochemical life - not electromagnetic life.

It is not necessary for electromagnetic life which uses magnetic fields to form structures and electric fields as agents of transport.Complex plasma (which is what bioplasma bodies are composed of, according to plasma metaphysics) can exist in a liquid-crystal state - similar to biological cells in the human body.

Particles in a liquid-crystal phase are free to move about in much the same way as in a liquid, but as they do so they remain oriented in a certain direction. This feature may make it superior to the properties of water - enabling liquid crystal bioplasma, polarized by magnetic and electric fields, to serve as an electronic matrix, a co-ordinate system and a template for the morphogenesis of the carbon-based fetus.

In this role, the symbiotic bioplasma body acts as a developmental catalyst for the carbon-based body.

Symbiotic Relationship between Plasma and Carbon Based Bodies

"Symbiosis" is a term used to describe a close ecological relationship between the individuals of two (or more) different species. Sometimes a symbiotic relationship benefits both species, sometimes one species benefits at the other's expense, and in other cases neither species benefits.

It has been observed by metaphysicists that the symbiotic relationship between the bioplasma and carbon-based bodies is one of "mutualism" where both species benefit.Dr. Robert Foot has suggested a coupling force between ordinary and mirror photons. He believes that one effect of this force is to make dark mirror matter intermittently visible as it travels through the atmosphere.

To generalize, plasma metaphysics hypothesizes that there are coupling forces between the carbon-based body and the invisible superstructure of bioplasma bodies which keeps them linked until any of the bodies die. This hypothesis can be cited as the Plasma-Carbon Symbiotic Life Forms hypothesis

(Really) Weird Plasma-Based Life Forms

Plasma metaphysics views the life-forms which have been described as "ghosts", "angels" and "deities" and other similar entities as weird plasma-based life-forms which are also evolving within Earth's dark matter counterparts.

As discussed in the author's article Angels, Ghosts, Deities and their Magnetic Plasma Bodies and book Our Invisible Bodies the appearance and properties of these entities, described by various observers, suggest a category of electromagnetic life forms that are not available for controlled examination because of limitations in current scientific instruments.

Much has already been written with respect to the anatomy and physiology of these plasma-based bodies derived from observations by metaphysicists and interpreted using current physics (see books and articles by Jay Alfred and others).

They could serve as basic models for further scientific research into weird life - a project that NASA has undertaken.

If NASA is serious about understanding the whole spectrum of weird life, maybe it should also search our own backyard. Weird life may not only be "out there" (in Jupiter and other gas giants, on the Sun and other stars) but it may very well be in your living room.

NASA's astrobiology team would need to categorize the life forms that have been described as ghosts, angels and deities as weird plasma-based life forms and study them within a scientific framework to the extent allowed by current technology.

Any confirmation of their existence would revolutionize our understanding of the scope of evolution at many different levels of existence, not just the biochemical level ... and, oh yes; it could have far reaching implications on our own existence, if any, after the death of our carbon-based bodies.