Andrey Sklyarov and 'The Physics of Spirit'
Milchar
There are such rare people whom I like to call de-facto Satanists. They don't claim to be Satanists, but they reinvent the Satanic phylosophy by themselves and, which is way more important, the things they are doing in their life make so much benefit for Satanism as hardly anyone of us could do.
 Andrey Sklyarov (1961 - 2016) photo from his site: http://lah.ru/ |
Now, I would like to tell you about one such person – Andrey Sklyarov, an experimental physicist who applied the methods of physics for studying the things that used to stay beyond any scientific research before. I hope that his books will be translated into English some day. Now, I want to present one of them, which is the best work of contemporary philosophy that I have ever read:
A.Sklyarov. The Basics of the Physics of Spirit. 'Veche', Moscow 2000.
In the introduction, Sklyarov says that philosophy is experiencing a crisis now, since neither Materialism nor Idealism has been able to build a consistent description of the being. It seems that the very idea of superiority of either the matter or the spirit is wrong, and the reality can be described better in terms of their equal interaction.
Therefore, it's time to develop a new approach to philosophy, which should treat it as meta-science, i.e. a higher level of theoretization, aiming to generalize the laws of different branches of science in order to formulate the laws of the being as a whole. The Hegelian dialectic was the first step in this direction; cybernetics and the information theory have made the second step. We need to go this way further.
In
Part I of his book, Sklyarov compares the matter and the spirit,
which leads him to drawing some similarities between the laws
describing them. He notices that the advances of science in studying
the material world have led it to the necessity to develop some
concepts that are not purely materialistic:
– the relativity of time and space, as well as mass and other physical
parameters;
– the wave-particle duality;
– the energy of vacuum;
– the quantum indeterminism, entangled states and some other ideas of
quantum mechanics.
Moreover,
in order to explain the nature and genesis of space, astrophysics and
cosmology also operate with hypotheses that depart far from the pure
materialism:
– the theory of superstrings;
– the hypotheses on multidimensional space with self-locked dimensions;
– the dark matter;
– virtual particles, etc.
In addition, although Materialism treats information as a material phenomenon, it is not such in strict sense, since the law of conservation does not apply on information (unlike matter or energy).
This all means that modern science is not materialistic anymore; it has now to deal with phenomena and concepts that contain a significant spiritual component and cannot be reduced to pure matter.
Therefore, science needs some methods applicable for studying the spiritual side of our world. Developing them is a task for the future; however, it's possible at least to list, what kinds of spiritual phenomena we can now observe, and where.
Physics says that the strongest forces appear either where the matter in concentrated in large masses, or where material particles come close to each other. Drawing an analogy to this, we can suppose that spiritual phenomena will be the most perceptible either in places of high concentration of spirit, or where different spiritual objects come into close contact. Both of this can be applied to the living world, especially to the human society.
We
can observe some similarities between living creatures and elementary
particles:
– various kinds of "charges"/"fields" making them
to attract to, or repulse from, each other;
– small factors can cause disproportionally large changes;
– the very fact of conducting an experiment changes the behavior of the
object being studied.
This also means that no clear boundary can be drawn between the material and the spiritual. For example, material elementary particles are already spiritual objects to a significant extent. Seemingly, the main criterion for distinguishing between material and spiritual phenomena is the applicability of deterministic laws: from purely material classical mechanics to partly spiritual quantum mechanics and to purely spiritual studies of the behavior of living creatures.
In classical mechanics, the main parameter that determines the properties of a material object is its mass. In the spiritual world, the structure and form of an object appears to play a similar role. Spiritual objects with a similar structure and form (such as animals of the same species) behave similarly, like objects with the same mass in classical mechanics. Thus, structure or form is a spiritual analog of mass.
Another useful property that makes spiritual phenomena differ from material ones is the applicability of the second law of thermodynamics. It's well known that this law does not work in cases when a material system receives energy from outside; this is a neg-entropic process. However, processes with any spiritual involvement are also neg-entropic; for example, evolution of life is such a process. Generally, any process of introducing some order into a previously chaotic environment is neg-entropic.
The information theory also uses the concept of entropy and postulates that entropy decreases when the system receives information. Therefore, we can conclude that information is a spiritual analog of energy. Mass and energy are linked by Einstein's formula E=mc2. We don't have a similar nice formula for structure and information yet, but it's obvious that the more complicated is the structure of a system, the more information it contains.
Due to the inseparability of the material and the spiritual, any object has both the material and the spiritual characteristics. The material ones are mass, size, density, state of matter etc.; the spiritual parameters are form, structure and potential abilities of the object. For example, things with the same mass and size but of different shape and structure behave similarly in material processes but differently in spiritual ones. On the other hand, a really existing object and just information on how to create it are practically the same for the spiritual world, but not so for the material.
When going from observation of predominantly material objects of classical mechanics to more spiritual elementary particles and to predominantly spiritual virtual particles, we can see another important property: spiritual objects cannot be definitely located in the material space and time. Time is what makes material processes to follow one after another; however, spiritual processes, such as developing new ideas, has also a property that makes them follow one after another: this is the causality. So, causality is the spiritual analog of time.
However, finding a spiritual analog of space is not an easy task. By now it's only possible to conclude that some spiritual objects tend to interact with each other more than other ones, and, therefore, can be considered as located in the spiritual space closer or more distantly. Probably, analyses of various out-of-body experience can give us some information on the spiritual space, since the people who have had such experience report to have been traveling in some kind of space different from the usual material one.
This is already sufficient for us to suppose that the spiritual side of our world has its own laws that are similar to some extent to the laws of the physics of the material. The spiritual world probably also contains macro- and micro-objects, as well as spiritual forces and fields.
One of the spiritual forces can be observed in the process of evolution. We can see that living creatures tend to change towards obtaining a more complicated structure, and that with the advance of their structure, the speed of the evolution also accelerates. The history of human society is a similar process. Here we can see that the more complicated (larger) is the structure, the more it tends to grow even further. We already know that structure is a spiritual analog of mass, and, therefore, this structural interaction is one kind of spiritual forces and an analog of material gravitation.
However, many spiritual phenomena cannot be explained with the structural interaction only. It's not always so that spiritual objects adjoin to each other to form a more complicated structure; they can repulse as well as attract without tending to actually join. Therefore, we have to suppose the existence of another kind of spiritual interaction that is similar to material electromagnetism.
Most often we observe this interaction in relationships between people; they love or hate each other according to similarities or dissimilarities in their characters, tastes, etc. However, the analogy to electromagnetism is less direct than in the case of the structural interaction and gravitation. Human souls are not just positive or negative electric charges or two magnetic poles either. If A loves B and B loves C, we cannot predict the result of interaction between A and C. Moreover, spiritual attraction tend to appear between similar people rather than different. This means that the closest analogy will not be electric charges or magnetic poles, but rather frequency spectra and resonance phenomena. Therefore, it's better to name this kind of spiritual force as resonance interaction.
In the second part of his book, Sklyarov describes human as a spiritual phenomenon. He states that purely materialistic attempts to explain the forces that drive human behavior can be persuasive to some extent in describing human's simple actions with material objects, but they fail completely to say anything about the more spiritual aspects of human behavior like art, fantasy, or curiosity to things unrelated to everyday life. Therefore, we need methods for researching the spiritual part of ourselves, which we call soul.
It needs to be stated clearly that we do not suppose any supernatural or divine origin of human soul. Soul is just a part of human that cannot be reduced to physiological mechanisms.
Human soul is not an amorphous bunch of spiritual substance, but a highly complicated structure. We can observe the spectrum of its reactions on different external influence as the person's character, as well as notice the features that are similar in all humans.
First of them is consciousness, i.e. the ability to receive and process information and change one's behavior as the result. This is similar to energy processing in material phenomena.
A more advanced form of consciousness is intelligence, i.e. the ability to generate information and produce spiritual objects, such as ideas, images, etc.. Since information is a spiritual analog of energy, the process of information conversion in intelligent species is similar to energy conversion in machines. The latter is measured by energy conversion efficiency, which characterize the amount of useful output per unit of input energy. A similar characteristic can be applied to the informational input and output of a human, i.e. the level of intelligence is a spiritual analog of energy conversion efficiency.
Information can be proceeded by at least two different ways: logical thinking and associative thinking. The materialistic approach used to attribute logical thinking to the left hemisphere of human brain, and associative thinking to the right hemisphere; however, some recent studies of brain show that the mapping of intellectual functions in the brain is at least not so straightforward. When viewing information as a spiritual phenomenon, we can see that logical thinking is an application of the structural spiritual field to information, while associative thinking applies the resonance field.
Psychology states that, in addition to the information received, human behavior is driven by motivations. However, it says nothing about the nature of motivation, which appears to be spiritual.
In most cases, a conscious action is a gradual process with control of intermediate results. The strength of motivation can change during this process depending on the satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the current situation in comparison with the original state of things and with the desirable result.
This means that motivation is a kind of spiritual force generated in the resonance interaction of several spiritual objects: the image of the real present, the image of the desirable future, and various images of the past. Drawing a material analogy, it looks similar to an electrostatic field generated by several electric charges of different signs. Such a field can be characterized by the potential energy at any distinct point. Thus, motivation is a spiritual analog of potential energy, as well as the transformation of motivation into actions is an analog of the transformation of energy from the potential into the kinetic form.
By now, we still cannot describe the exact structure of human soul. Sklyarov proposes a schematic model of soul that looks like a pyramid turned upside down.
The pyramid consists of many layers of elements linked with various horizontal and vertical connections. The lowest part of the pyramid corresponds to the innate part of soul that is already present at birth. For the lifetime, new layers are growing on lower ones; in childhood the speed of their growth is at the maximum, and then it slows down as the person gets older. Not all the elements are interconnected; the pyramid looks rather like a set of blocks consisting of tightly connected elements each, while connections between different blocks are relatively sparse. Some blocks are grouped into larger super-blocks, such as ego, id, super-ego and probably some others. Different blocks can perform the same kinds of actions, but by different way. An image of the present situation is attracted to some of the blocks with the resonance spiritual interaction, and this defines, which block will work in this case.
Any practical skills of the person correspond to some distinct links between the elements of the pyramid. The more diverse experience the person has, the denser are the connections between elements and blocks.
This
model reflects some known properties of human soul:
– all development of personality is based on the previous experience,
which in any case cannot be completely forgotten;
– innate characteristics limit the possible ways of personal
development to some extent;
– different processes in the soul are running in parallel and only
weakly depend on each other; sometimes they can even contradict;
– in mental diseases, mostly the recently developed psychic functions
suffer.
Emotions can be viewed as resonance processes in human soul initiated by an external influence. Despite the fact that our language denotes emotions with a limited set of words, they form a continuous spectrum without distinct borders between different types of emotions. Each person's soul has a kind of its own "emotional filter", i.e. different sensitivity to different parts of the emotional spectrum.
The spectrum of emotions widens with personal development. A newborn can feel only the simplest emotions, while an adult discerns such subtle emotional nuances that even lack appropriate words in the language. This can be viewed as oscillations in the lower or higher parts of the soul pyramid, resulting also in the ability of the lowest emotions (such as fear) to suppress higher ones.
Similarly to the process of mechanical oscillations, the amplitude of emotional oscillations can vary, and, if it gets extremely high, the oscillations can become destructive. In human soul we observe it as emotional stress or affect.
Since human soul is the most complicated spiritual object that we know, it must be a powerful source of spiritual fields, the structural and the resonance one. If any other spiritual forces and fields exist, most probably they can be discovered in human soul as well. They might appear, for instance, in some obscure phenomena such as the influence of human presence onto the growth of plants. However, this could be a yet undiscovered material field as well, because the effects of spiritual fields are not limited by the material distance.
Relationships between people and their ability to form groups can be viewed as resonance interaction between their souls. However, due to the complexity of human soul, dissonance interaction is always present too and makes people experience negative feelings to one another.
Therefore, the ability of people to stay together depends on the complicated interaction between their resonance interaction towards each other and dissonance interaction with the rest of the people. Thus, a group that feels being hated by others can be held together even by a weak resonance within this group.
Some theories in quantum physics suppose the existence of additional self-locked dimensions at sub-atomic scale to explain some phenomena. Similarly, we can suppose the existence of some kind of a spiritual 'human dimension', which is also self-locked inside the human soul and which forms the so-called internal world.
At the end of his book, Sklyarov makes some speculations on the possibility of afterlife existence of human soul according to his pyramid model. He disagrees with the concept of reincarnation, but supposes that some parts of souls of dead people might continue to exist in some form and even become included into the soul of a living person.