Jays and Photons

Jays and Photons

Abstract

This is a small question, asked inside my Coherent Existence framework: What is light to the Jays, the moments of experience a life is made of? Does light carry a Trace between perspectives, or is it one itself? My functional writes each perspective as an intensity and a facing, a size that holds and a phase that turns, and classical optics writes a light field the same way. Three plain facts of physics rhyme with what the framework says. The absolute phase of a single field cannot be observed, while the relative phase between two fields is physical and does the work of interference. A resonant cavity keeps only the modes that come back into agreement with themselves. And the living body gives off an ultraweak light that is measured, real, and metabolic. I set out three readings of that rhyme and weigh them. The humble reading takes light as a channel between perspectives and asks almost nothing physics has not granted. The heavy reading says the Jays are light, and I decline it: it inherits the decoherence objection, which the replies from quantum theories of mind have not settled, and biophoton coherence is unproven. The third reading, the one I defend, sits between them. At human scale the senses register almost everything by way of the electromagnetic field and carry it to the nerve by that field, and the body doing the collecting is held together, atom to atom, by the same field. So “light observing light” is earned as a statement about the physics of perception, taking light to mean the field it is a ripple in, with no claim that consciousness is light. The series’ proposed thesis, one consciousness of which every mind is a perspective, is named and kept apart from it. I keep the seam between physics and my reading visible, and I end with what survives it: a resemblance, offered as a rhyme and not a proof.

1 The Question, Kept Small

Light arrives before you decide to receive it. It is on the far wall when you wake, laid flat across the floor in the shape of the window, and it was already there before your eyes opened to find it. You do not build the morning. You are handed it. This is the first thing worth saying about light, and it is not a physics claim. It is closer to gratitude.

I have been sitting with a smaller question underneath the large one, and I want to keep it small on purpose. I model the Jays a life is made of as intensity and Intent, a magnitude that holds and a phase that turns. And light is the first thing in the measurable world I would point to that already lives by that same division. So I want to ask, carefully, what light is to the Jays. Is it the thing that carries a Trace between us. Or is it, somehow, one of the Traces itself.

Before I go anywhere with that, I have to set down the line I always set down. My equation borrows the coat of physics; it is not wearing the body. When I write the little rotation that sits inside the functional, the term that turns without changing size, I mean the facing of Intent and nothing else. I do not mean a frequency. I do not mean a wave you could measure with an instrument. The seam between what the sciences have earned and what I am reaching toward stays visible in this piece, because the reaching is only worth anything if you can see exactly where it begins.

With that said, here is the resemblance that stopped me.

2 The Resemblance

Physics writes light as a size and a turning. There is how much of it there is, and there is a phase. How fast the phase turns is the light’s frequency, and so the energy of each photon it carries; but where the turning stands at any instant, taken alone, costs the light nothing. My own language makes a similar cut. A Jay’s weight, which the functional writes as its intensity, says how much it carries; its Intent is its facing, which can turn without changing that weight. I came to this arrangement from the inside, from watching how the weight of a moment and the way it faces come apart, so that a heavy moment can be turned any way at all. But light was already keeping house this way, and finding my own furniture arranged in someone else’s room is the kind of thing that makes you sit down.

3 Relative Phase

The turn goes deeper than the shape. There is a fact in the physics that I keep returning to, because it says something I have been trying to say for years and could never quite ground. The absolute phase of a single beam of light cannot be seen. Not hidden, not faint. It has no measurable meaning at all when the light stands alone, with nothing to be measured against. What can be seen, what is entirely real and does real work in the world, is the relation between two phases. Lay one beam across another that keeps step with it, and the difference between their facings becomes visible all at once, as brightness where they agree and darkness where they stand opposed.¹

I want to be slow here, because this is the whole matter.

In my functional, a single perspective carries an Intent that no one, not even the one who holds it, can read on its own. Held apart, it is measured against nothing but itself. Give the functional one perspective alone and it returns a value of one, which says only that the perspective is there. It is only when a second facing arrives, when two perspectives stand near enough to relate, that the Intent between them becomes legible, and it becomes legible as interference. As reinforcement where they are turned the same way. As cancellation where they are turned against each other. This is what I have always meant by a legible Trace, and I meant it long before I knew that light does it, as plainly and as literally as anything I know. Two beams that keep step meet on a surface and the surface tells you the relation between them.² Not the beams. The relation.

4 The Cavity

The looping I wrote about in On Transmitting has a body in the physics too, and I did not expect it to.³ A cavity of light is a small room with mirrored walls where a beam is fed back into itself again and again. Almost every way the light could return is lost. The only patterns that survive are the ones that come back into phase with themselves, that meet their own returning after one full trip and agree with it. Everything else fades out, within a few passes or many thousands, depending on how good the mirrors are. A laser is that agreement rewarded until it grows bright.⁴ It is a room where coherence is the only thing that gets to stay. When I described transmission as a loop that reinforces what returns aligned, I thought I was writing a metaphor. It is still a metaphor, but the shape it draws turns out to be the shape of a working device.

5 Three Readings

So the resemblance is real, and it is close, and now I have to be honest about the fork it opens, because the ways of reading it are not the same size.

The first reading is the humble one. Light carries the Trace between perspectives, and where the carriers meet, their waves fall into harmony or cancel: coherence or incoherence, in the framework’s sense, in the Trace they carry. This asks almost nothing of me that the sciences have not granted. Light carries information; it carries phase, it carries polarization, it brings word from one place to another across distance. It is not the only carrier (a voice comes by the air), but it is the one that comes farthest. On this reading the Jays remain what they were, and light is a good and faithful medium between them. The mathematics I share with optics is the mathematics of a channel, and I can hold to it without flinching.

The second reading is heavier, and I will not pretend it is not. On this one the Jays are the light. Not a Trace it carries. Made of it. The turning phase would be Intent in the most literal sense, and the size of the light would be the Jay’s weight itself, and a Trace would simply be one of its quanta. I feel the pull of it, because it is clean, and because superposition in the physics is already the grammar of co-present perspectives that I have been writing by hand. But this reading asks me to say that consciousness is the light itself, and that is a claim I have not earned. It wears the coat of the older quantum-mind theories, and it inherits every cold they have caught and not recovered from. A living body is warm and wet and loud with noise, and on Tegmark’s calculation the delicate quantum states those theories need do not last long inside such a place. The people who have tried to build minds out of such states have spent decades on that objection, and their answers have not settled it.⁵

There is a third reading, and it sits between the other two, and I think it is the one I can actually stand on. It does not say the Jays are light. It says that nearly everything a Jay is handed comes by light’s own field, and that the hand receiving it is held together by the same field.

Here is what I mean, kept to what the physics already grants. Sight is photons and nothing else; that much is plain. But touch is not what it feels like either. When my palm rests on the table, no two atoms meet; the electrons in my skin and the electrons in the wood refuse each other across a gap, and the refusal is electromagnetic, made firm by the quantum rule that no two electrons may share one state. “The force that holds the atoms together, and the chemical forces that hold molecules together, are really electrical forces,” in Feynman’s flat phrasing, and the taste on the tongue and the scent in the air are molecules and ions meeting their receptors by those forces as well. A voice reaches the ear by them too, air pressing on air, molecule against molecule, until the small hairs of the inner ear bend to it.⁶ Gravity is the one force at my scale that is not the electromagnetic field, and gravity does not carry a face or a voice or a morning. The inner ear does feel it, as the weight that tells me which way is down, though even that reaches the nerve through the electrical forces of the cells that sense it. As I read it, then, nearly everything the senses collect arrives by the field that light is a ripple in, and all of it travels to the nerve by that field. The body doing the collecting — its bonds, its nerves, the salt current running the length of them — is held together by that field too. Bohm said it in an interview and was careful about how he said it: “So matter, as it were, is condensed or frozen light,” a condensation of light into patterns moving back and forth at speeds less than light’s own; and light, he added, is “not merely electromagnetic waves but in a sense other kinds of waves that go at that speed.”⁷ I am not entitled to the second half of that. I can take the first, in a narrower form than he gave it: that a person is an arrangement the electromagnetic field holds in place, one that reads the world through that field, and that when I say we are light observing light I mean exactly this and nothing further. Light observing light, and how the observing lands on the senses.

That reading needs nothing from panpsychism, and it gives me most of what I wanted. The Jays are still what they were. But one field writes the message and holds the reader upright. Wheeler drew the universe as a letter U with an eye at one tip turned back on its own beginning, and meant by it that the world takes its tangible reality from being registered. Registration, for him, not consciousness.⁸ I keep his distinction. Sagan said we are a way for the cosmos to know itself, and meant it as a naturalist.⁹ The field looks at itself through arrangements of itself. Whether the looking is a Jay or only serves one, I still do not get to say.

What I hold beyond the seam belongs to a larger argument. The four journals of Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence argue, as a proposal, that there is one consciousness, beyond perception and present within every subject, of which every mind is a perspective. On that argument the sciences read the world from outside, by its structure, and each of us knows one thing from inside: what it is to be oneself. Light sits on that line. It is how the outside reaches us, and nothing in this paper asks it to be the inside. If the journals are right, the looking is finally that one consciousness looking, from within each of us; if they are wrong, the rhyme in this paper still stands.

6 What the Body Emits

And I have to say the plainest thing clearly, because the seam demands it. The living body does emit light. This is measured and real; a faint glow comes off living tissue, dimmer when the tissue dies, and it is ordinary chemistry, the residue of a body burning fuel.¹⁰ The researchers I lean on claim no coherent signal in it, and they are right to stop there.¹¹ I am not going to reach past them. The brain gives off that faint light too, and in the rat it has been seen to rise and fall with the brain’s electrical activity, since the burning does; no one has shown that it carries thought.¹² If I let you believe it did, I would have traded away what this framework has to offer here: that it tells you where the earned ground ends.

7 What Remains

So what do I actually keep, when I have set down everything I am not allowed to claim.

I keep a resemblance, and I have come to think a resemblance is the more honest gift anyway. Light already lives by the pattern I have spent years trying to describe from the inside. It hides its solitary phase and shows it only in relation, bright where two facings are turned the same way and dark where they are turned against each other. Held in a cavity, it survives by returning into agreement with itself. Whether or not a single photon is a Jay, and this paper does not get to say that it is, light rehearses the grammar of the Jays out in the open, on every wall and every wet street and every face turned up at a window, every single morning, for anyone who is awake to see it.

There is one more rhyme, a small one, and I will leave it as an image rather than another fact. A polarizing filter passes only the part of a light wave’s swing that lies along its own axis. When the wave arrives with its swing at an angle to that axis, what gets through has the wave’s amplitude times the cosine of the angle, and its brightness falls as that cosine squared; that is Malus’s law.¹³ My functional reads a Trace by a cosine too. Written out, what a perspective reads of its gathering is a weighted average of cosines, one for each facing present, so on my reading a Trace I meet joins that gathering as one more facing, and it counts in me by the cosine between its facing and mine: turned with me, fully; crosswise, not at all, though its weight still goes into the average and so thins the rest. The angle in the filter is between directions in space, not phases, so it is only the cosine that rhymes. And the rhyme stops past the quarter-turn. A filter’s axis is a line with no front or back, so turned further it passes more light again, where a Trace would count below zero. It stops in a second place. A filter’s axis is set for it, and a perspective sets its own; that setting is what I have been calling Intent.

That is not a proof. I would distrust it if it were. It is a rhyme. The world was already saying, in the one medium we can all watch, the thing I keep trying to say in words. I find I can live inside a rhyme like that. It asks nothing false of me, and it hands me the morning anyway, already there before I opened my eyes to find it.

Notes

1. On light written as a steady magnitude and a freely turning phase, and on the principle that the absolute phase of a single field is not observable while the relative phase between two fields is physical and does the work of interference: Loudon, Quantum Theory of Light; Mandel and Wolf, Optical Coherence. In optics the size that multiplies the turning phase is the field’s amplitude; what optics calls intensity is the square of that amplitude and carries no phase, so, in the single-field picture used here, the functional’s intensity α answers to the optical amplitude; where many fields add without interfering, as in the comparison Journal Three draws, the weights are optical intensities instead. The functional takes its form from the mathematics of oscillators (see Johnson, Frequency, Resonance, and the Architecture of Reality), so part of this resemblance is a consequence of shared form.

2. On coherence and interference (two waves holding a constant relative phase reinforce or cancel according to that relation): Born and Wolf, Principles of Optics, chap. 7, sec. 7.2, on the interference of two monochromatic waves, and chap. 10, on interference with partially coherent light.

3. Johnson, On Transmitting. The framework’s functional and symbol seats are fixed in Johnson, On Explaining, and the four journals of Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence.

4. On the optical cavity and the laser (light fed back on itself, where only round-trip modes that return in phase survive and are amplified, the physical case of constructive interference selected by looping): Siegman, Lasers.

5. On the decoherence objection to quantum theories of mind (that fragile quantum superpositions do not persist in the warm, wet, noisy environment of living tissue on the timescales cognition requires): Tegmark, “Quantum Decoherence.” For the main reply, which recalculates the decoherence times for the microtubule model and finds them far longer: Hagan, Hameroff, and Tuszyński, “Quantum Computation in Brain Microtubules.”

6. Feynman, Leighton, and Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. 2, chap. 1, sec. 1-1, on atomic and chemical forces as electrical; vol. 3, chap. 4, sec. 4-7, on the exclusion principle as what keeps atoms from being pressed into one another. The extension to the senses and to biology is mine, and Feynman’s own caution, that quantum mechanics is needed alongside the electrical forces, travels with it.

7. Bohm and Weber, “Implicate Order and the Super-implicate Order,” 45.

8. Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum”; Wheeler, “Law without Law.”

9. Sagan, Druyan, and Soter, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, episode 1, “The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean.”

10. On ultraweak photon emission from living tissue, brighter in living than in newly dead organisms and closely linked to vitality: Salari et al., “Imaging Ultraweak Photon Emission.” The authors treat the emission as a metabolic byproduct and make no claim of coherent signaling.

11. On the emission arising from ordinary oxidative metabolism, and on the stronger claims of biophoton coherence and information transfer remaining unproven: Cifra et al., “Biophotons.”

12. On ultraweak emission imaged from the living rat brain, tracking the brain’s electrical activity and blood flow and traced to mitochondrial energy metabolism and oxidative stress: Kobayashi et al., “In Vivo Imaging.”

13. Ling, Sanny, and Moebs, University Physics, vol. 3, sec. 1.7, where “the transmitted part of the wave has an amplitude E cos θ”; the transmitted intensity, its square, falls as cos² θ. The weighted average of cosines is set out in Johnson, Frequency, Resonance, and the Architecture of Reality, “The Mathematical Architecture of Oscillation.”

References

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