Jude Currivan, a cosmologist with an Oxford physics degree and author of The Cosmic Hologram and The Story of Gaia, speaks in an excerpt from Pinchbeck's online course The Future of Consciousness. She presents a case that the universe is constituted by meaningful in-formation rather than random data, projected holographically onto a two-dimensional boundary and pixelated at the Planck scale, citing the holographic principle associated with black hole thermodynamics and Leonard Susskind, and a 2017 analysis of the cosmic microwave background at the University of Southampton. She traces the same fractal and power-law patterning through earthquakes, human conflicts, internet hubs, galaxies and city growth, and points to a 2018 entanglement experiment linking laboratory photons with starlight and quasar light as evidence of universal nonlocality. She also responds directly to Bernardo Kastrup.
Guest: Jude Currivan
In brief
- Currivan insists on the hyphenated term in-formation to separate meaningful, structuring information from random data, arguing it literally rather than metaphorically forms the universe.
- She argues that the same holotropic attractor patterns and power laws appear across atoms, weather, ecosystems, earthquakes, armed conflicts, internet topology, galaxies and city populations, indicating a single informational substrate.
- She cites the 2018 experiment entangling laboratory photons with 600-light-year-distant starlight, triggered by a quasar 12.2 billion light years away, and the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics as establishing universal nonlocality as settled science.
- Currivan pushes back on Bernardo Kastrup's framing of nature as fumbling and of individuated minds as dissociations, preferring to describe individuation as differentiation within a fine-tuned evolutionary impulse.
- She reframes the Big Bang as an ongoing big breath, linking it to Brahman's exhalation and to prana, and notes the universe was transparent to sound before it was transparent to light.
- She points to the initial 75 percent hydrogen and 25 percent helium mix as a fine-tuning condition without which stellar nucleosynthesis of the heavier elements could not have proceeded.
Full text
so what this is showing us and I've only got a very short time today so this is running through it but the evidence is arrayed both in my books on the website and I'll be delighted to answer questions but it shown that Cosmic mind articulated as digitized and vitally meaningful information I am obsessed with a hyphen because I want to differentiate between a notion of random data which I'm not talking about and the understanding of me meaningful information which pervades our entire universe and which is represented through Dynamic and innately relational patterns and processes that literally not metaphorically literally in forms the formation of our entire universe this particular slide is a slide of the W map analysis of the cosmic microwave background and this essentially is a map of the entirety of Space Time as um essentially imprinted on Space Time at a moment in the story of our universe around 380,000 years after it began 13.8 billion years ago when it cooled down expanded and cooled down enough to be transparent to light I'm going to come back to this but what you see here in the color variations are minute temperature variations and fluctuations that show the patterns the holographic patterns the forier uh functional patterns um of that temperature variations throughout space and time so what the evidence is showing us that our universe manifests holographically and again it's reality but we're looking at the holographic principle initially from the um thermodynamic analysis of the information uh on black holes and we I'll respond to a question about this because it will probably take more time than we have at the moment but that standing of black hole thermodynamics and information when expanded to the entirety of the universe and Leonard susin was mentioned earlier um is the holographic principle and this is the leading model now amongst cosmologists of the nature of the appearance of our universe the nature of the energy matter and space-time appearance of our universe and as a result the information I'm talking about the universal information that I'm talking about is essentially project Ed consciously by Universal Consciousness on what's known as the brain the universal brain Be A and E of the 2D boundary of what we call our universe it's great thought and just as in our high defition Technologies it's pixelated but its pixelation at the minute plank scale is a trillion trillion times smaller than our greater you know our highest High defin um Technologies so here it is as seen for the first time in 2017 and analyzed for the first time in 2017 by a group of um researchers left by AFI and Costa sceris at Southampton University showing the fractal and holographic patterning throughout the whole of space and therefore the whole of time and it's showing that it emerges at the scale of the plank named after Max plank the fractal patterns of so-called holotropic attractors of meaningful information these underpin their appearance which I'll go on to show but the plank length is minute you can see the you can see the the dimensions here but these are human Dimensions the point around the plank is that it's not necessarily um a human Dimension a human measurement plank measurements plank scales of length and mass and time and in fact energy fall out when we bring the laws of physics together and so for example a plank length is the length um of which a beam of light travels in one plank time doesn't matter what that plank length is measured in or what that plank time is measured in it relates to the speed of light as a universal constant and therefore the plank measures although we measure them in in what we're familiar with with meters kilogram seconds nonetheless fall out as normalized unitive um Cosmic Universal measures and any species who's able to undertake the sort of science that we do would likely come across these plant understanding and pixelation of reality at some point we see these fractal patterns at all scales of existence literally from atoms where electrons structure fractally when uh an element changes from example from an insulator to a metal we see them in the shapes of clouds we see see them in the the the the the shapes of mountain ranges and coastlines and river systems we see them at planetary at solar system levels we know the solar wind from the Sun the particles from the Sun are clustered fractally we know and can measure them in terms of galaxies and in terms of um uh vast clusters of galaxies we see them through the systems of our planetary home Gaia and we see them through our evolutionary processes we also and this is vital we see them in Collective human behaviors which reveal the same relational patterns both power laws and our fractals as we do in in so-called natural systems but we're part of nature we're not apart from nature and therefore we see the same patterns in ecosystems and the nodal points within ecosystems and them actually healthily um existing and evolving in what's called critical States at the optimum edge of flexibility and resilience when the internet was able to be analyzed which is a long time back now the nodal points the hubs the backbones of all of the interconnectivity of the internet show the same fractal and power LW relationship I we see them in the form of earthquakes the frequency and destructive power of earthquakes when analyzed over thousands of earthquakes and graphed instead of an average earthquake which a gaussian uh distribution would show they show essentially a straight line between frequency and the logarithm of destructive power that's the Rus scale and that shows there's no such thing as an average earthquake but it does show that all earthquakes are related in that their frequency has a common relationship to their destructive power and vice versa analysis of conflicts human conflicts whether it's the analysis that was done by uh by after the the second world war of conflicts over a number of centuries or work more recently done by leis Richardson and team at Florida University of insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan show the same relationships between the frequency of of a conflict and its destructive power in terms of human fatalities as earthquakes it's the same relationship there's a slight difference in the pitch of the straight line but it's the same what's known as a power law and then um uh abilo but Harvard analyzed the growth of galaxies and the growth of cities in terms of population densities in the case of galaxies in in terms of star populations in terms of cities in terms of human populations and they grew in the same fractal ways they're all underpinned by these holotropic attractor patterns of meaningful information and this particular pattern which is made up of millions if not billions of of of informational points is called a Lorent attractor and it rather looks like a butterfly's wing and you know that was written in a seminal paper which was uh when he identified the nonlinearity of these Rel relationships in the you know the flap of butterflies Wing in wherever it was Bolivia Argentina could cause a hurricane in America that might be apocryphal but it's certainly the case that these holotropic attractive patterns underpin all of what we call complex systems in 2018 MIT scientists were able to show Universal nonlocality a nonlocality and Bernardo referred to this was both both a prediction of quantum physics in the sense that the sort of non-separation of quantum entities was not able to be understood without our entire universe being so non-locally unified but at the time it was a theoretical prediction it was only in the 1980s that experiments were able to extend that Quantum nonlocality of so-called entanglement from the quantum scales to ever largest scales and in 2018 it was done by entangling laboratory photons with Starlight from 600 light years away captured obviously through a telescope and crucially the whole entanglement was triggered by light from a a very active uh galactic center called quaza 12.2 billion light years away now that therefore extended the experimental understanding of universal nonlocality effective effectively to cosmological scales and I think it was referred to earlier that in 19 in 2022 a Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to three researchers one of whom was involved in the 2018 analysis which was Anton Zinger um but three researchers who researched Universal in other words our entire universe existing and evolving as a non-local non-locally unified entity and the Nobel is only given to settle science it wasn't given to Einstein because of relativity because when he was when he was given his Nobel it was for the photovoltaic effect because you know not um photoelectric effect I apologize because that was settled relativity wasn't but this is I'd like to just now move on really because when Bernardo talked about nature fumbling I really wanted to push back about that because in my experience and understanding nature does not fumble and from the very beginning 13.8 billion years ago our universe began not in the implied chaos of a big bang but as an extremely fine-tuned simplest and first moment of what I refer to as an ongoing big breath and I use that terminology for a number of reasons but primarily because it brings that lastness of the big breath of our universe's ongoing evolutionary journey through intimately through our little breath in every moment you know the ancient uh word for Indian word for breath is Prana which is also the word for spirit so there's many many correlations but basically also our universe was seen as an exhalation an out breath of Brahman so again this new understanding and the evidence that it's providing in is really coming back to an ancient understanding of a universe that meaningfully exists I would add to that a much later perspective of evolutionary purpose that I'll come to but because of that ability because of that plank scale extreme fine-tuned order it essentially embodies the possibility the potential to evolve from simplic it to ever greater levels of complexity and individuated self awareness which I would suggest the terminology of differentiation rather than disassociation um and I absolutely appreciate what Bernardo is saying in the sense that you know that individuated self-awareness offers us an incredible opportunity to experience what that means but adds to the universal the universe is evolutionary impulses and journey because our universe's non-local unity means that it spontaneously is aware this great mind this great thought that is our universe and it's all pervasive awareness Consciousness means that it understands itself in its wholeness whilst expressing itself in its diversity and its evolutionary diversity we also now know and this again correlates with both Universal well ancient wisdom teachings certainly the theic tradition of the primordial om but also as Bernardo refer to in in you know the Bible it talks about in the beginning was the word we now know that beginning in such a minute but also incredibly hot State our universe was not transparent to light for its first 380,000 years but it was transparent to sound and the best modeling we have of that very early Epoch suggests that in indeed there was a trinity a cord of harmonic wavelengths as it were of sound that reverberated through that early universe and essentially shephered the first uh energy and matter that would become Stars hundreds of years later and then in stars in Stellar nucleosynthesis was the ongoing through generations of stars hydrogen and helium to all 94 natural elements and there's some incredible examplers of how from that very beginning for example there was an exact mix of hydrogen and helium not just hydrogen the simplest element from the beginning but 75% hydrogen 25% helium because in its neutrality helium would stay stable for several hundred million years until the first stars were formed and it was vital for that for that early Stellar formation to enable the ongoing nuclear synthesis because if there wasn't sufficient helium in that mix rather like the sort of yeast in a bread it would not rise if there wasn't sufficient helium from the very get-go when then it came to helium um synthesizing to more complex elements to carbon and then onwards it would not have happened the harmonic resonances required were too fine-tuned if only I had been created in the Stars themselves rather than being there in a good amount from the very first moments of our universe there's a wonderful story here that goes through generations of stars galaxies black holes very ear much earlier black hole formation than had hither to been thought of and that's because black holes have this incredible stabilizing role to play Not Just Stellar black holes but crucially Galactic super massive black holes to stabilize further evolution in galaxies so this is still an ongoing journey of Discovery but what we've discovered so far is is extraordinary and wonderful
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.