Much of what we experience these days is digital. Broadcast television is now completely digital. Most audio is digital. And everything you do on the Internet is digital. Most people know this. But, after contemplating this most obvious of concepts for a while, it occurred to me that all of these things have no mass.
Digital means that something is converted into numbers, or more specifically, a particular sequence of numbers. If you arrange the 0’s and 1’s in just the right way, you get a Spongebob Squarepants episode. When you purchase something on the Internet that is to be downloaded, such as Naturespace audio, or a movie off of iTunes, you are essentially purchasing a specific numerical sequence of zeros and ones, which, in and of itself, has no mass. But it does take up space. And each time it is copied, it takes up more space. There are many of these numerical sequences that are sold on the Internet.
Now it’s not as if you were out of zero’s and needed to buy more, or that you have all these leftover 1’s around from your Spongebob purchase last week because you used more zero’s watching it. You already have the 0’s and 1’s on your hard drive or whatever, you just need to arrange them correctly. Once the numerical sequence is created, it can be disseminated and copied easily, only requiring the energy to transfer the numbers, but not actually existing in the world the way that doughnut you are eating does. Want to eat that doughnut again? Gotta buy/make/get another. Wanna watch Spongebob again? Just run the numbers.
The digitizing of data has made it into something much more analogous to thoughts and ideas: mass-less information. Text used to require a page in a book, now it just appears on the screen. It seems like the world is becoming a lot more like a brain every day.
From the very beginning of my role as the chief recording engineer for Naturespace, I have been consistently surprised by the many new ideas and thoughts that result from listening to the accurate recreation of natural sounds and spaces. I am looking forward to being able to share and explore these ideas on our new blog.
One of the most unique aspects of listening to Naturespace is what we call the true “being there” experience. For me, after spending thousands of hours exposed to this “virtual reality”, I have developed a strong desire to understand perception and it’s relationship to reality. Astrophysics and cosmology have always been interesting to me; I am an active astronomy enthusiast and most of the science I read about involves these realms of study. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is something most people do not understand, even though it has been the working model for the world we see around us for the last 60 years. Most people still think of the world in Newton’s terms, and believe that gravity is something like magnetism. But it’s not, gravity is the result of warped space-time due to the presence of matter. Space tells matter how to move, and matter tells space where to curve. But through the endless ideas that physics presents, I have always noticed the absence of consciousness as an integral part of the equation. Since quantum mechanics clearly states that you cannot observe an event without altering it, and relativity states that reality is different for different observers, I have always wondered why it seems to end with no further questioning or explanation of the role of consciousness in the universe. Enter Biocentrism.
Biocentrism is a scientific theory that suggests that life created the universe and not the other way around. One of the fundamental principles of Biocentrism is that a comprehensive physical model of the universe can not, and will never be achieved without understanding the role of consciousness. The first problem one must get past is the obvious chicken and egg scenario where consciousness must reside in a “place” in order to exist, so the “place” must come first. But this is only a problem if you believe that the past is unaffected by the present, which Biocentrism states is not the case. Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology and astronomer Bob Berman have co-authored a fascinating new book explaining this radically new vision of the universe called Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe. In it, they explore and explain the ideas and their ramifications on the understanding of the physical world. I am very encouraged by the prospect that science is finally looking at what I consider to be a most obvious component of the universe.
Dialogue