How Bruce Duensing Thinks

[Burnt State]

Of course we’re all entitled to our own opinions, and I thank you for yours.

Said with grace and very much in keeping with the values of the primary subject at hand. Your own opinion is always welcomed.

 

[Waller]

Those densities are definitely there, and in some cases it seems that the pilots of such objects appear to be quite dense themselves in the absolutely ridiculous airplanes and missteps they engage in see Broken Bow incident. It's possible that they could be visiting us from their dense spaces though that seems rather unlikely on the face of it, but perhaps there are other methodologies of transit and different purposes that we have yet to imagine ourselves. In fact they could be all around us.

That's where I have to say I greatly admire Bruce Duensing's approach. His mind is wide open to possibilities and is frequently inventing them as other potential considerations for what could be derived from studying this phenomenon and its impact on witnesses. You will find here people stuck in their boxes of belief and denial, and you will also find very open minded folk open to possibilities.

We all define different walls and lines in the sand. It's probably better to draw lines in the sand though, as wind and water can alter those easily, and in a pinch you can always make a new art piece with sand. Walls take so much longer to build and tear down.

ET Channeling and Channelers | The Paracast Community Forums

 

[Burnt State]

@spacebrother recently posted the tribute episode for Bruce with Red Pill Junkie and myself . I think it's a fairly decent & somewhat thorough investigation of Bruce's thoughts, or at least scrapes some of the iceberg of his panoramic thinking. There were good laughs and other emotions attached to this episode and it's worth a listen if you are into creative ways of thinking about the UFO or UAP.

A Tribute To Bruce Duensing – Life Is But A Dream | Radio Misterioso

I don't quite know which was the very first Radio Misterioso episode I first listened to but I remember the connection was strong from the start. I hope this episode makes some connections with listeners, even if they are only oblique ones. This is one of @red_pill_junkie 's image notes he made of Bruce's previous episode on Misterioso. It's a brilliantly encoded short form ledge to leap from.

One of our focal points from the episode: If the UFO is a symbol of cognitive anarchy that reminds us that we are in a state of flux all the time, then perhaps there is some personal freedom to be found in learning to accept entropy, not so much as a natural order to events, but to know that causality can be confining if we limit ourselves to the old ways of thinking. Be freed up by the images in your mind and the poet’s voice that you hear as you go to bed late at night. For under that pile of rocks in your head is a ticket to freedom: consciousness is imagination.

The best part of this show was the many opportunities Bruce Duensing's ideas provide for personal discovery. You are the metaphor. Maybe that's what the alien will say back to you when upon meeting for the first time your opening question is, "What am I?"

 

[Constance]

André Breton was instrumental in the transitioning from Dadaism to surrealism in the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research in 1924. In 1916 André Breton discovered the theories of Sigmund Freud and met Guillaume Apollinaire. Here lies a connection between Andres’ Breton, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung, as Brenton apparently in agreement utilized some of their observations.

“Two separate forms of expression in Surrealism arose through different conceptual theories which derived from specific formations such as Dadaism and the theories of Breton, Freud and Jung. Through the clarification of the founding and influences on Surrealism, the research question: "Surrealism art and the comparisons of the two formations of Automatism and Veristic Surrealism" will be responded.”

“During the war Andre Breton trained in medicine and psychiatry where he used psychoanalytic methods of Sigmund Freud, with the aim of trying to expand the potential of the mind by reconciling the opposing states of dream and reality.2 Freud was able to develop techniques allowing individuals to release their imagination through his exertion of work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious, which ultimately became of great importance to the Surrealists. Their accomplishments and investigations will be discussed further to form a basis of knowledge of the founding of Surrealism in order to be able to understand and compare Veristic Surrealism and Automatism to the fullest.”

“Breton and his companions tried to place themselves in a hallucinatory state, in which they thought they were able to perfectly obtain their subconscious minds and extract pure thoughts, uncontaminated by the conscious mind and its rational restrictions.”

One of Jung’s outstanding quotes is; “When you observe the world within you see moving images, a world of images generally known as fantasies “.

I noticed this here, where you wrote about Bruce’s thoughts; “And what is reality and anomalous events inside of reality but an experience of

S.R.L., I'd like to read more from the source you quoted above. Do you have a link to it? Thanks.

 

[Burnt State]

Another RPJ summary note that really accurately describes Duensing's primary focal point.

In trying to connect the dots, in understanding what happens in how we get from A to B in life, he notes that what is of most interest is the interspatial space. Something is in the sky. We see something in the sky. The processing in between these moments is another matter.

Bruce said that consciousness is essentially imagination. Because we don't see anything directly but virtually; consequently, the means and the methods of the processing environment is the critical space to explore. Causality presents similar problems as the UFO appears to teach us that events are not always connected linearly and this calls into question many of our basic premises of the structure of reality. What is time and memory he asks.

So, wonders Bruce, when you meet the alien, just what exactly is the pertinent question to ask? There's no point in asking where they come from, if on a star map we can't say where we come from. Our points of reference are not always known let alone understanding our own personal paths of navigation. Much of his work focuses on the act of reconciliation: how do we reconcile what happens between A and B, how do we reconcile our own existence? Increasingly I was lead to the position that Bruce was using the UFO as a metaphor of our own design and that the UFO was representative for him of other human processes concerned with understanding the nature of existence. The UFO then becomes agent provocateur in this manner. We remain seekers of information, looking for confirmation of our suspicions.

 

[Eric Wargo]

Robert, I'm just listening to your conversation with RPJ and Greg and I'm blown away by the level of exegesis. I'm ashamed to admit I always had trouble penetrating Bruce's writing, because of my narrowminded fixation on punctuation. I usually found it too effortful to parse his sentences. But you guys really draw out his brilliance. This will be worth multiple listens.

 

[Wade]

What he said ...

But really, I do echo eric 's sentiment. I do have to admit , not having any higher education or teaching in such matters as philosophy and related fields I have to admit a rather limited understanding in such topics and therefore I avoid the consciousness and paranormal threads because I am a bit intimidated .. but God bless the participants and their thoughtfulness...I probably wouldn't have even paid attention to that earlier RM episode if you hadn't name checked him and i do think I may have gotten a little more clarity from your posts and reposts(?) of Miguel 's thoughts. My only regret is that i once again have been introduced to an interesting blogger only to lose them shortly after I started familiarizing myself with their concepts but fortunately there is a decent back log to get caught up to.

But haven't listened to the tribute show yet.

 

[Eric Wargo]

My only regret is that i once again have been introduced to an interesting blogger only to loose them shortly after I started familiarizing myself with their concepts ...

Yep, my thoughts exactly. It sucks.

 

[Wade]

And what I said above also applies to you eric, I am just now getting to familiarize myself with your work and have added you to my bloglist

Out of propriety I avoid touching on the unimplied implications and consequences of my actions.

 

[boomerang]

Some of the best minds in any field shun the limelight. That seems to have been the case with Duensing.

 

[Burnt State]

Robert, I'm just listening to your conversation with RPJ and Greg and I'm blown away by the level of exegesis. I'm ashamed to admit I always had trouble penetrating Bruce's writing, because of my narrowminded fixation on punctuation. I usually found it too effortful to parse his sentences. But you guys really draw out his brilliance. This will be worth multiple listens.

Given the headspace you operate in, Eric, I'm highly appreciative of the compliment. The one piece i really fell down on was Bruce's conceptual thinking around the idea of energy=information. I wish I had documented his own comments regarding this on his Misterioso episode much better. Vallée talks about the need for a physics of information in his first TED talk and I'd be curious to know what you think about this.

In Bruce's thinking he describes how these paranormal phenomenon are concerned with large amounts of energy and that the possible exchange taking place with a witness is the imparting of massive amounts of information. This does call to mind the downloading of the Rendelsham binary code as well as the Contactees, or how some witnesses are very destabilized following a close encounter, as if their own mental hard drive has simply received an information overload.

 

[Burnt State]

Some of the best minds in any field shun the limelight. That seems to have been the case with Duensing.

The irony was he had expressed some concerns as to why were his blogs not getting he attention he felt they deserved. Was it his lack of concern for commas as RPJ pointed out, or was he operating so far out of the box that the ideas were just not that readily accessible? It's quite unfortunate as the more I go through his material the more I appreciate his ability to pull together so many disciplines and to be informed so much by a surrealist set of concerns. I think his artistic elements and the way he used ideas about metaphor were boundary pushing, in the same way the UFO is boundary breaking and pushes our own minds to make other considerations of what it may be. If we eliminate the social scripting that currently defines the UFO we start to see some of the other potentials and parallels that are up for grabs regarding the phenomenon.

Bruce's ideas around ghosts and UFO's as parallel phenomenon are actually quite interesting as seen in the OP. Working this way one is no longer cordoned off by the limitations of the ETH or the IDH and you can start to look again at the whole thing with new eyes. That's my main takeaway from his approach, his ability to literally and unapologetically freely shun the standard ways of thinking about UFO's and arrive at a more unpolluted set of tracks to follow. I wish he was around now to conduct this discussion himself but I suppose he laid the tracks and for those who are deeply curious he offers new trajectories to follow. May it happen.

 

[Burnt State]

What he said ...

But really, I do echo eric 's sentiment. I do have to admit , not having any higher education or teaching in such matters as philosophy and related fields I have to admit a rather limited understanding in such topics and therefore I avoid the consciousness and paranormal threads because I am a bit intimidated .. but God bless the participants and their thoughtfulness...I probably wouldn't have even paid attention to that earlier RM episode if you hadn't name checked him and i do think I may have gotten a little more clarity from your posts and reposts(?) of Miguel 's thoughts. My only regret is that i once again have been introduced to an interesting blogger only to lose them shortly after I started familiarizing myself with their concepts but fortunately there is a decent back log to get caught up to.

But haven't listened to the tribute show yet.

Wade, of course I am eager to know what you thought about this episode, as you have a very curious mind that is very wide open. I'd appreciate hearing your perspectives on Bruce's ideas, what rings true, what's innovative and what, if anything, makes no sense. We didn't get a lot of prep time for the episode as Greg wanted to do a tribute soon after his passing so there was a lot of brain stretching, but I confess, it's only after my fourth listening of Duensing on Misterioso that what he's saying is now clear, structured, even ordered. Trying to wrap around his many other tangents and keep it inside of a two hour episode had its own constraints. Like most things in life, I wish I had a second crack at it.

I'm in total agreement with you regarding the Consciousness and Paranormal threads. I can't keep up, or at least I just don't have the spare time to work through it. Not having a background in philosophy is a real limitation I've discovered, though the neuroscience elements increasingly are playing roles in this discussion. Bruce kept on about how ufology has just not kept up with contemporary science at all. I got a colleague who teaches philosophy to give me a primer, The Nature of Mind, and that will be some of the summer reading along with Eric Wargo's writing and the tangents he references. The most intriguing and new ideas I've run across so far are contained in the blogs of people with very wide open and creative brain spaces, one living and one dead, which should make for a very balanced approach I suppose.

 

[Eric Wargo]

...The one piece i really fell down on was Bruce's conceptual thinking around the idea of energy=information. I wish I had documented his own comments regarding this on his Misterioso episode much better. Vallée talks about the need for a physics of information in his first TED talk and I'd be curious to know what you think about this.

Vallee's "physics of information" idea is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and am developing a blog post on. I'm not the only one, it seems. It's interesting that everyone is converging on this idea now--I suddenly see everyone quoting that phrase, maybe because of the TED talk. I recently went back and reread Messengers of Deception, though, and what he said in his TED talk is pretty much verbatim what he was thinking in the mid-1970s when he wrote that book. He also mentions it in his Journal from the period. I haven't read or seen anything where he develops this idea beyond the sketch he gives in that book, other than extending it into synchronicity (Guillemant's theory) a bit in the TED talk. It's a little odd to me, because I would think that he would have pushed and developed his ideas in that direction a lot over four decades. Do you know of any article or anything where he has developed that concept?

In Bruce's thinking he describes how these paranormal phenomenon are concerned with large amounts of energy and that the possible exchange taking place with a witness is the imparting of massive amounts of information. This does call to mind the downloading of the Rendelsham binary code as well as the Contactees, or how some witnesses are very destabilized following a close encounter, as if their own mental hard drive has simply received an information overload.

This is a very interesting idea, but I'm somewhat skeptical of taking that "downloaded information" at face value. Many 'altered states' including mystical/religious experiences, hallucinogenic experiences, as well as UFO encounters produce the feeling that one is seeing or receiving massive quantities of information, but very often the person cannot actually say afterward what that information was--the receiver is just left in awe of something enormously complex that they were just in the presence of, or that came into them. I get this from Terence McKenna, for instance, who spoke in compelling, awed terms about the information that alien entities made available to him, yet there is very little indication in his writing what that information was. His own thoughts are clearly brilliant and inspired, but I don't remember anywhere in his writings where he actually can reproduce some amazing piece of data or thing he learned during his trips. It tends to be more general insights (solidified language, etc.). With a few notable exceptions, Phil Dick's 2-3-74 experiences were similar--a sense of vast information being received, astonishing artworks and music experienced, etc., but then an inability to reproduce anything concrete beyond various random words, phrases, etc.
The brain clearly has a "vast complexity" signal that, when combined with other signals such as the "YES this is absolutely right" signal, can produce the illusion or sensation of receiving something sublimely detailed and true--it is like a "skin" or feeling-tone overlay onto the experience, without necessarily the actuality of receiving much information. I suspect this is going on in a lot (not necessarily all) of these types of UFO encounters. I'd love to hear counterexamples if you know of any--i.e., where someone actually clearly learned something they didn't know before. (There are a few such examples in Dick's case, although those didn't involve UFOs--e.g., his son's hernia.)
So, I'm not sure that the destabilization is actually because of an information overload per se--in other words, what is destabilizing may just be the utterly WTF quality of the information, not its actual quantity. Thoughts?

 

[Constance]

I share your curiosity about what various people in different disciplines assume when they use the term 'information'. I think the generality and abstractness of the term are problematic in many situations in which the term is used these days. The journal Information devoted an issue this year to exploration of a number of questions and issues relating to information and physics, expressed in this call for papers:

"Information has enabled new interpretations of quantum phenomena that promise fresh theoretical and practical insights. It also lies at the heart of statistical mechanics. Longstanding paradoxes in thermodynamics have been solved (or raised) using information and computation. In cosmology, it has been suggested that the universe has an unexpectedly limited capacity to store and process information, perhaps indicating that space and time are not fundamental properties of reality. Paradoxically, physics seems to impose constraints on information, such as the speed at which it can travel from one region to another in or how much information we can extract from a physical event at the smallest scale. Focusing on information flow, it has also been suggested, will also help us better understand how cells and complex biological organisms work. Indeed these days molecular biology is mostly an information science.

But it is computer science that has placed information at the center of the modern debate. Digital information has dominated technology in the half century, empowering and extending human capabilities to new frontiers. How unreasonable is the effectiveness of digital computation in the natural sciences? Is computation the obvious description of information-processing? What are the connections between carrying information, programming artificial and natural systems, and computation? What is the nature of the interplay between information, entropy and other complexity measures?

This special issue is devoted to all these questions as approached through rigorous and unpublished technical work from areas such as cosmology, astrophysics, mathematics, computer science, complexity science, biology, and neuroscience. The central topic for authors to bear in mind is some foundational aspect of information and reality, or information processing in nature."

That issue has now been published and six articles from it are linked through open access at this page:

Information | Special Issue : Physics of Information

Also see issues in 2015.

 

[Constance]

Here are two related pages by Lee Smolin:

INFORMATION AND COMPUTATION | Edge.org
THINK ABOUT NATURE | Edge.org

 

[Burnt State]

Constance, you are a constant source of excellent information. (Edit: just started reading the Smolin article thinking abut nature and the evolving laws of physics - excellent material)

This is what I was looking for:

Abstract: "A consensus is emerging that the multiple forms, functions and properties of information cannot be captured by a simple categorization into classical and quantum information. Similarly, it is unlikely that the applicable physics of information is a single classical discipline, completely expressible in mathematical terms, but rather a complex, multi- and trans-disciplinary field involving deep philosophical questions about the underlying structure of the universe. This paper is an initial attempt to present the fundamental physics of non-quantum information in terms of a novel non-linguistic logic. Originally proposed by the Franco-Romanian thinker Stéphane Lupasco (1900–1988), this logic, grounded in quantum mechanics, can reflect the dual aspects of real processes and their evolution at biological, cognitive and social levels of reality. In my update of this logical system—Logic in Reality (LIR)—a change in perspective is required on the familiar notions in science and philosophy of causality, continuity and discontinuity, time and space. I apply LIR as a critique of current approaches to the physical grounding of information, focusing on its qualitative dualistic aspects at non-quantum levels as a set of physical processes embedded in a physical world."

Information | Free Full-Text | The Logic of the Physics of Information

Repeatedly, we see in interesting thinkers about paranormality the oft repeated phrase, "time is not what you think," and there are some interesting consequences and applications there for considering the experience of unique phenomenon and our interplay with it.

I'll be looking for more accessible distillations of these notions from Eric Wargo in the near future.

 

[Burnt State]

This is a very interesting idea, but I'm somewhat skeptical of taking that "downloaded information" at face value. Many 'altered states' including mystical/religious experiences, hallucinogenic experiences, as well as UFO encounters produce the feeling that one is seeing or receiving massive quantities of information, but very often the person cannot actually say afterward what that information was--the receiver is just left in awe of something enormously complex that they were just in the presence of, or that came into them.

I don't agree with the download of information piece at all either. We simply are ill equipped biologically to actually receive information from other species, biosystems etc. though many "get a feeling" or "tune into vibrations" which I feel is, like Terrence's thoughts, just wishful speculation. It is very expansive in its imaginings for the receiver of that message though.

In this way anyone who claims mediumship or translator between a person or group of people and their god, spirit, avatar, alien contact etc. is in a great position of power to complete wish fulfillment on behalf of those in need of a message - be they in a cult or feel like their marriage is breaking up. Priests and "energy healers" all just take on the mantle of being "in contact" and their expression of the narrative, especially when it comes bathed in the shapes of immaculate metaphors like jesus resurrecting or the alien mothership, are very fulfilling and meaningful for the tribe.

Similarly, you see something amazing, and if we go along with this new thinking that information is physical, then what we are seeing is in fact representing an incredible quantity of information, but whether or not we can interpret it or understand its context even, is really outside of our own current paradigms. We are seeing something there which is incredible and comes pre-loaded culturally with a lot of knowledge weight, but no matter one's socio-environmental context seeing strange lights in the sky, and seeing them up close especially, will really knock one's socks off!

This guy says it better than me. Can't believe be was speaking just thirty minutes around the corner from me...must start paying more attention to the location of where current thought is taking place instead of just reading about stuff on the internet.

The brain clearly has a "vast complexity" signal that, when combined with other signals such as the "YES this is absolutely right" signal, can produce the illusion or sensation of receiving something sublimely detailed and true--it is like a "skin" or feeling-tone overlay onto the experience, without necessarily the actuality of receiving much information. I suspect this is going on in a lot (not necessarily all) of these types of UFO encounters. I'd love to hear counterexamples if you know of any--i.e., where someone actually clearly learned something they didn't know before. (There are a few such examples in Dick's case, although those didn't involve UFOs--e.g., his son's hernia.)

I can not give you those counterexamples, at least not ones that don't have more reasonable explanations to them. The thing to keep in mind with Dick's experience, as with some of the abductee people I referenced on Misterioso, one side of the brain may produce information that the other side is not getting access to and so upon moments of better lucidity, vs. thoughts taking place in manic or schizoidal states, where the experiencer may feel they are getting information from the alien (VALIS or Ashtar) or from The Operators, these may in fact be received and interpreted by the individual in states of clarity to be coming from outside themselves, thus fantastical information appears on the doorstep and we say YES to it. But really, the actual discovery of that information in an altered state will get rescripted by a mind much more interested in metaphor. "There is no information without representation," says Zurek. This has some interesting implications.

So, I'm not sure that the destabilization is actually because of an information overload per se--in other words, what is destabilizing may just be the utterly WTF quality of the information, not its actual quantity. Thoughts?

You know what's interesting about Zurek's ideas around Darwinism and Quantum reality is that information may be contextual - is that not correct? I saw that in Constance's papers she posted up above. Why do we not see 'Quantumness' everywhere in the universe Zurek asks? Why do we see classical interpretations of reality, simple stable states instead of being at least in two places at once - are these contextual to the environment of those perceiving? When someone sees a UFO are they looking at something that is not stable, an emergent consciousness, an emergent lifeform, something quite ephemeral perhaps, whose unstable construction may give it a very ghostlike appearance or interpretation, as it dissolves, races around and disappears again.

Tell me, have you ever faced something impossible before - you know, like suddenly facing your death, or having a shark in your face, the gorilla that suddenly jumps out of the jungle into the clearing and is screaming wildly in your face - these are life altering events. They impact one's brain. In fact we know now that trauma affects one's brain biologically and when individuals start to relive memories or find themselves in similar contexts those parts of the brain that house that trauma memory will flare up again, thus creating a new reality, a new perspective on the world, as if some new piece of information was permanently programmed into the brain upon that first contact.

This happens for people all the time in major life events like birth, death, near death, getting the life scared out of you etc. so imagine the destabilizing experience of confronting or experiencing a whole new life form whose very existence is about an incredible amout of energy, or information, that is getting perceived by an individual. That's going to cause some very interesting effects for that person, and it's a personal thing and may in fact encode ideas and information that have little to do with the emergence of that unusual object or thing. I like Zurek's description of decoherence and how our own stable state is able to replicate down the ages. What if the UFO is a different, unstable thing trying to assert itself in an unfamiliar context, quantum life trying to manifest in a classical context. Does that make any sense?

on a sidenote: you know, what's interesting since I started getting back into ufology again is just how quickly the ideas have extrapolated into the intersections of physics and philosophy and have brought me to the doorstep of more contemporary scientific models as a means to interpret what's taking place. i am so ill equipped myself to download and process this type of information. Eric, you appear to be best in a position to possibly popularize these ideas and give ufology a much needed contemporary jolt. the complexity will scare people away, but somewhere, in another universe, a reconstituted Duensing is already reading what you will write in the future and is smiling. Please mention him in your writing, if you can, and complete the feedback loop.

 

[Constance]

Here is a link to Zurek's paper "Quantum Darwinism" ~~~

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0903.5082v1.pdf

Extract:

"V. DISCUSSION
We derived the two controversial quantum postulates from the first three. We have thus seen how classical domain of the Universe arises from the superposition principle (postulate (i)) and unitarity (postulate (ii)) as well as rudimentary assumptions about information flows (postulate (iii)), and a few basic facts about states of composite quantum systems (including their tensor nature, often cited as additional "axiom (0)").

The essence of the measurement problem {accounting for axioms (iv) and (v)} has been largely settled. It is of course likely one may be able to clarify assumptions and simplify proofs. Much work remains to be done on Quantum Darwinism and envariance. Nevertheless, nature of the quantum-classical correspondence has been clarified.

Physicists take it for granted that even hard problems are solved by a single good idea. Therefore, when a single idea does not do the whole job, often our first instinct is to dismiss it. Measurement problem does not fall into this "single idea" category. Several ideas, applied in the right order, led to advances described here. Logically, we may well have started with the derivation of Eq. (5) and the analysis of quantum jumps. Their randomness leads to probabilities. And symmetries of entangled states (that arise in decoherence and Quantum Darwinism) allow one to derive Born's rule. As we have seen, phase envariance is (nearly) "all you need". With probabilities at hand one has then every right to use reduced density matrices
to analyze Quantum Darwinism and decoherence.

Our presentation was "historical". We started with decoherence, and used it to introduce Quantum Darwinism. Analysis of copying essential to information flows in both of these phenomena led to quantum jumps. This in turn motivated entangelment-based derivation of Born's rule. Quantum Darwinism -- upgrade of E to a communication channel from a mundane role it played in decoherence -- tied together all of the other developments. This order had the advantage of making motivations clear, but it is different from more logical presentation where postulates (i)-(iii) are the starting point (strategy followed in [38]).

The collection of ideas discussed here allows one to understand how "the classical" emerges from the quantum substrate starting from more basic assumptions than decoherence. We have bypassed a related question of why is our Universe quantum to the core. The nature of quantum state vectors is a part of this larger mystery. Our focus was not on what quantum states are, but on what they do. Our results encourage a view one might describe (with apologies to Bohr) as "complementary". Thus, <ji> [see text for symbol, pg. 9] is in part information (as, indeed, Bohr thought), but also the obvious quantum object to explain "existence". We have seen how Quantum Darwinism accounts for the transition from quantum fragility (of information) to the effectively classical robustness. One can think of this transition as "It from bit" of John Wheeler [39].

In the end one might ask: "How Darwinian is Quantum Darwinism?". Clearly, there is survival of the fittest, and fitness is defined as in natural selection -- through the ability to procreate. The no-cloning theorem implies competition for resources -- space in E -- so that only pointer states can multiply (at the expense of their complementary competition). There is also another aspect of this competition: Huge memory available in the Universe as a whole is nevertheless limited. So the question arises: What systems get to be "of interest", and imprint their state on their obliging environments, and what are the environments? Moreover, as the Universe has a finite memory, old events will be eventually "overwritten" by new ones, so that some of the past will gradually cease to be reflected in the present record. And if there is no record of an event, has it really happened? These questions seem far more interesting than deciding closeness of the analogy with natural selection [40]. They suggest one more question: Is Quantum Darwinism (a process of multiplication of information about certain favored states that seems to be a "fact of quantum life") in some way behind the familiar natural selection? I cannot answer this question, but neither can I resist raising it."

 

[Burnt State]

In the end one might ask: "How Darwinian is Quantum Darwinism?". Clearly, there is survival of the fittest, and fitness is defined as in natural selection -- through the ability to procreate. The no-cloning theorem implies competition for resources -- space in E -- so that only pointer states can multiply (at the expense of their complementary competition). There is also another aspect of this competition: Huge memory available in the Universe as a whole is nevertheless limited. So the question arises: What systems get to be "of interest", and imprint their state on their obliging environments, and what are the environments? Moreover, as the Universe has a finite memory, old events will be eventually "overwritten" by new ones, so that some of the past will gradually cease to be reflected in the present record. And if there is no record of an event, has it really happened? These questions seem far more interesting than deciding closeness of the analogy with natural selection [40]. They suggest one more question: Is Quantum Darwinism (a process of multiplication of information about certain favored states that seems to be a "fact of quantum life") in some way behind the familiar natural selection? I cannot answer this question, but neither can I resist raising it."

Which then made me ask the same of the UFO which appears to be something that is breaking some of the rules: it emerges out of instability, stays stable briefly and then appears to disentangle from our environment and go to elsewhere. We as witnesses are left gawking at this magnificent, brief appearance of a visual object that is entirely tempting and enticing.

Bruce suggests repeatedly in his writing, and this repeats in the writings of many interesting thinkers about the UFO, that it is there to prompt us to ask questions, UFO's are here to make us think is the meme and mantra of so much of the history of ufology. What I find interesting and accessible in say the writings of Duensing and Wargo is that there is a creative impetus behind their writings that seeks out contemporary metaphors that can be used as models & systems to promote new understandings of what it is we are seeing. I like the creation of such scenarios as they are pregnant with potential and encourage others to also travel in tandem along a transit of contingencies to see what there is to see, with a portion of the map secured in hand.

A basic definition of decoherence: "Decoherence does not generate actual wave function collapse. It only provides an explanation for the observation of wave function collapse, as the quantum nature of the system 'leaks' into the environment. That is, components of the wavefunction are decoupled from a coherent system, and acquire phases from their immediate surroundings. A total superposition of the global or universal wavefunction still exists (and remains coherent at the global level), but its ultimate fate remains an interpretational issue. Specifically, decoherence does not attempt to explain the measurement problem. Rather, decoherence provides an explanation for the transition of the system to a mixture of states that seem to correspond to those states observers perceive. Moreover, our observation tells us that this mixture looks like a proper quantum ensemble in a measurement situation, as we observe that measurements lead to the 'realization' of precisely one state in the 'ensemble'."

In rewriting the above we have also a very standard definition of a UFO witness event: There the UFO sits in the sky and observers are seeing different things, a Schrodinger's black box floating up above - could be a flying saucer or could be nothing at all, could be living or could be dead, and as we each watch it we feel that in our observation of the UFO the wave function collapses and there, a UFO from another world has leaked out into our environment, the appearance of a classical object, performing in unclassical manners, defying physics as we know it, and perhaps its appearance, acquiring phases from the immediate surroundings simply so that the perceiver is allowed to perceive. Whatever it is in that black box of quantum identity, it is our interpretations of the object that define it at that moment. Our measurements are useless as it is an evolving contraption, a shapeshifter, an ensemble overture, an assemblage of states. The randomly selected witness is being stimulated and prodded perhaps by the very problems that physicists are trying to answer today about the nature of quantum reality. It is an excellent representation of that problem and prompts us to ask a lot of questions about the nature of reality.

If we look backwards in time in that Vallee ethnographic, observational history of us and the UFO's, we see the object shift and change to meet the contemporary problems of the physics of the day. Bruce also commented on this: we see airships as we are learning to fly; we are seeing foo fighters work as missile guided tracking systems; we see objects hover; we see them transform - we see them break our current set of " physical rules" as they demonstrate a next mode of transport. They are transformative transportation devices.

They cause us to ask questions and seek knowledge. Are these hints? Are they gifts? When a person comes before the guardians of truth in any era to proclaim the heresy of new truths we first reject, mock, exile and then burn those for being in league with the devil. I find it also very interesting that those who claim contact with the occupants of such "ships" to report the same forms of torture and illumination that mystics, alchemists and scientists of any era report from their own experiences of contact with the ultra-knowledgeable other. Of course we are a little more sensible now in our approach to such discoveries. As the UFO evolves so too do we.