UFOs : the emergence of a new paradigm

By Philippe Solal, associate philosophy
National Institute of Applied Sciences in Toulouse

When the words «paradigm shift» in the field of philosophy of science are used, this is the use of a very powerful expression. The term paradigm (which derives from the ancient Greek Paradeigma meaning « model » or « example ») is used to designate today a major moment in the way we represent the world. In the case of hard sciences such as physics, talking about « new paradigm » is to announce the emergence of new systems of representation and, correspondingly, is introducing a new way of treating the objects we want to study.
 
So when Michel Foucault speaks of « paradigm shift » in the science of the sixteenth century, he describes how the new science (the Galilee) considers the nature, through a new relationship between words and things. Nature is now considered a « book », the true book of God (instead of the Bible), and we must decode his language.
 
This effort will lead to the mathematization of physics, date of birth of science as it is practiced today, as for Galileo, the language of God, expressed in natural forms of mathematical type. Similarly, when Edgar Morin, in the twentieth century, announces the emergence of a new scientific paradigm, that of complexity, in Volume 4 of The Method: Ideas, he wrote: « We are in the preliminary establishing a paradigm of complexity […] It is not the task of an individual thinker, but the work history of a convergence of thoughts. »
The new paradigm is therefore not only announces the coming of a change in the methods and objects of science. It is more profoundly new way of understanding the inner structure of reality: a reality in Galileo encrypted (encryption that is read) or a reality in which all parts are interdependent and interacting with Morin.
 
Why recalling the meaning of that term in the preamble actually very didactic? Because it seems clear that a new paradigm is emerging in the field of hard sciences, specifically biology and physics, emergence whose common characteristic concerns the primacy accorded to information. « The object I’m working on is the information » declared in substance biologist and geneticist Pierre-Henri Gouyon in a given early 2014 conference in Toulouse. It is true that in terms of information, particularly in the work of sequencing genes, geneticists know what they are talking about and what they have done. But physics invites debate on the status of the information seems a priori more amazing. Yet it is in this area that the conceptual transformations seem most radical and the most significant. It is this « convergence of thoughts » evoked by Edgar Morin and is the first sign that a paradigm shift is taking place.
 
Perhaps with all the problems of the thought experiment devised by the English physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1871 and known as the « Maxwell’s demon » begins. Without going into too much technical descriptions , it is enough to say here that Maxwell proposed a thought experiment which leads , in heat exchange (eg between a hot gas and cold gas ) violation of the second law of thermodynamics which states that any real transformation takes place with the creation of entropy. For example, if you leave the door open a refrigerator off, the refrigerator temperature and room will balance, and it irreversibly without energy supply. However, experience of Maxwell’s demon offers a process to return to a state of uneven temperature without spending energy and decreasing entropy, which is impossible in principle according to the second law of thermodynamics. Everything happens as if a  » little devil  » was able to select the information in the heat exchange , that is to say « choose » , inside two compartments each containing a different gas temperature any molecule to pass through an opening (depending on the speed of agitation) and any other push to reduce entropy.

Suffice it to remember here that this experiment (presented here very briefly) brought to the forefront not only referring to the process of energy transfer but also to information. Common today that, according to physicists considered, call themselves the « informationalisme « , the « digital physics » or « the Physics of Information » are all, more or less, the heirs of this birth that is the experience of Maxwell demons.

In the twentieth century, with the advent of information theory and cybernetics Shannon Wiener, new steps will be taken. The physical world will be truly redesigned informational terms, exceeding the only sphere of intersubjective communication, the concept of information which is then reduced too often. In biology, a DNA sequence is a « genetic code containing information ». Hormones and enzymes are considered messages. The human brain is an information processor. The satellite sends and receives information. Computer science is the processing and analysis of information by machines, etc.
 
But thanks to the development of computer science, a provider of real models of representation , it will go much further, the researchers will begin to treat information as an organizational factor that can theorize as a physical object and that can be measured . Thus, to take a few examples, snowflakes, solar turbulence, crystals, all fractal systems or weather type are treated as « complex systems » where the concept of information becomes central. The information can be stored, grow or deteriorate. The speed of light is limited, physical currents can occur in nature that cause loss of information in an open system, but also locally, increases complexity. We can observe that some thermodynamic exhaust created by the exchange processes and energy dissipation initially chaotic vortex systems eventually find equilibrium positions, becoming more regular and even organized. While the Boltzmann equation defines the increase in entropy by the formula S = K.log (p), Shannon, on the same model, define as information entropy measure H = -K.log ( p) , formula equivalent but opposite sign to the Boltzmann equation .
 
What has been described is an intermediate step towards the revolution which would restore our purposes the most significant elements. The cybernetic model will gradually give way to an ontology, that is to say scientific theories that consider the information is not only one of the dimensions of the adjoining properties energy -matter but it is the foundation, the inner essence of reality. Among the theorists who will open this bold axis, it is impossible not to mention:
 
a) physicist John Archibald Wheeler of Princeton University , who summarized this approach in his book In complexity , Entropy and the Physics of Information ( in 1990 ) by a famously :  » It from bit « :  » reality  ( is conceivable ) from the bit . « 
Being the fundamental reality, that is to say to him, particles, space-time itself, are informational.
 
b) the physicist Richard Feynman , Wheeler before , in an article dated 1982 , conjectured that the universe was in its most fundamental dimension as a  » giant quantum computer  » idea then taken over by the British physicist David Deutsch of Oxford and Seth Lloyd of MIT in the United States .
 
c) From IT specialists, the idea also made its way: and Stephen Wolfram, in 2001 he published an important book, A New Kind of Science, which opened two radical proposals: 1) Everything in the universe, including such fundamental categories of space and time, is the product of programs or standard computer algorithms. ; 2). Not only all of the universe is the product of various computer programs, but these are short and simple addition.
 
d) Very serious review Research published in its number 489 July-August 2014 an article in the Italian physicist Giacomo Maurio Ariano, University of Pavia, entitled  » Is the universe a quantum computer ?  » Which outlined the reasons why the physics of information could solve problems in which quantum physicists were plunged. Among these, there is the problem of the « vicious circle » of particle physics :
 
If you ask a physicist What’s in our universe, he says , they say, it consists of a quantum field , and the particles are only the « manifestation » fluctuations or excitations of this field . If we now ask what ‘s in the quantum field , they will answer that it consists of multiple quantum systems whose particles which interact with each other. That the particle or field first? And how out of this crisis of representation ? Giacomo Maurio Ariano argues that the « quantum field  » does not form an inseparable unity, a unified continuum , but it consists of discrete and discontinuous parts called quantum pixels: « imagine the universe, reality is discontinuous and discreet , means that not only particles , but the whole space which is based on quantum pixels: in other words, the pixels are not  » in space  » they « are » the space it -even « .

But there is a serious confusion in how to understand and interpret the explanatory models that are used to provide digital design to reality. Comparison so often made with the work of fiction Matrix Wachowski brothers (illuminating on many points ) is its limits . In this work, our reality is presented as a numerical simulation, a neuro- simulation, which doubles the « true reality » , consisting also of space, time, matter and humans who have found refuge on a ship, the Nebuchadnezzar . This scenario, as visionary as it is, does not correspond to the way we engage the physics of information we discussed. Who said « simulation » presupposes the existence of a model (first reality is the « boss », the « original model ») that we will redouble on another plane , which proves illusory in relation to the consistency of the original model. And images that appear on the screen of a computer are a simulation because the pixels that form the images on it, from the lines of code that run, give us the illusion of being face of a real object , and this process is consistent with the etymology of the word simulation (simulare the Latin verb meaning  » to the likeness « ). This property repetition is also not specific to digital simulation and includes any form of images (that of a photograph, that of a movie) and behavior (simulation role playing etc.).
 
It is therefore wrong to say that the physics of information leads us to a conception of reality that it would be a « simulation « . Maurio Ariano , in the article cited above, clearly expresses this point: the fact that the laws and the evolution of our universe can be simulated by a quantum computer does not mean that our universe is a simulation. We must, in fact, raise us to the shore of the metaphysical and say, « the reality is the simulation « , which can also be expressed more directly as follows: « reality is a pure software » (p .49 op.cit). More deeply, to think of reality as an information system, we need déprendre us that the rock is simulated / simulation. The real is not « simulated », it is given. It manifests itself in our perception as « matter » but its inner essence is information.

We do not yet have, in this paper, raised the issue that is the UFO phenomenon. The reader will easily understand that we must first make this detour through this new theoretical framework to make sense of the approach that is now ours. We said in a previous article on this site, « The philosopher and UFOs » that whatever the end by which we could take the UFO problem, it invariably led us to the same conclusion: the need to think the meaning we give to the word « reality », a task that involves both science philosophy, the latter occupying its history, a prominent place in this debate. The intimate nature of reality, « the essence of being, » as they say in the tradition of thinkers, is indeed the great business philosophers.
Promises that suggests the physical information we offer a possibility among others to question what we call reality and therefore focuses directly UFO research. We write « among others » because physics has produced in recent decades, other approaches that significantly broaden the scope of speculation about the exact origin of the UFO phenomenon. Multiverse, parallel universes, twin universes, alternate realities are part of these curious objects to which we push scientific research. But because the problem is the biggest UFO denial of the history of science , researchers who see this phenomenon in the possibility of a new light on the new physical theories of space-time are still forced to do secretly draw to reach the level of challenge that this represents new horizon . This work is performed as « contraband » because no research laboratory now, as yesterday, the issue of UFOs in its research program, as material capable of supplying. Therefore, researchers are trying to understand using new concepts from the « official » work of science , have the unenviable role of stowaways.
Only the strangeness of the quantum world, as we described since the early work of Max Planck in the last century, we seem to climb until at the strangeness of the UFO phenomenon and to be able to us provide intellectual tools sufficiently adapted to try to define its contours. At the same time, the physicist Richard Feynman wrote in 1965 in The Character of Physical Law: « I think I can say that nobody really understands quantum physics. » And then we could just as well say, on the same register, « nobody really understands the nature and origin of the UFO phenomenon. »
 
The emergence of particle physics that combines the strangeness of the quantum world with informationaliste paradigm is changing that . We affirm that many testimonies on events that violate ostentatiously the most basic principles of our physical, can not find an explanation in this new framework. But this requires to add information and resulting ( pixels qubits , algorithms etc.) quantum objects that some ufologists still consider the most overlooked of physics: consciousness.
 
Physical information can be a really fruitful opening ufology when it has accepted that take into account the role of consciousness in the description of the material does not constitute an unscientific attitude. This role, however, physicists have already experienced the pregnancy through, in particular, the phenomenon known as « quantum decoherence  » that connects the collapse of the wave function of a particle with the act of observation of a subject. With this collapse occurs then instant selection of one and only one state among all bunk possible that the particle could virtually make statements. Without the presence of an observer, that is to say a conscious subject, this selection can occur.
 
To my knowledge, today , the French physicist Philippe Guillemant fully invests the subject and explores the close relationship between matter and consciousness, as evidenced by his book The Road of Time , published in 2010. Of course, I don’t forget the work of David Bohm on this relationship in the 1990s as part of his theory of quantum holography. But in any case, the emergence of consciousness in the field of study of particle physics has explosive consequences. No scientist is fooled on this point, although most are cautious. This introduction allows subvert almost everything. Thus, in Philippe Guillemant the linearity of time and the arrow of causality are undermined by the possibility of an efficient retrocausality become the phenomena of synchronicity ; the unity of our world, which could be  » split  » into alternate realities ; the intimate structure of the time, where we could distinguish a relative time and a « real » time , etc.
 
So if we add this last parameter, that of consciousness, the informational approaches to physics, if given to consciousness instead owed to a central place, then, we believe , new fields of very promising investigation is open to conjecture as to the origin of the UFO phenomenon , which itself will be a  » second consequence  » of a new stage in our understanding of reality . We could, in a theoretical framework that integrates consciousness, open many doors, until you know thereafter as some close .
 
This framework gives us a glimpse that the perceived matter and the laws that govern the behavior, would , in the end, the illusion , for our consciousness , a world produced by pure intelligible forms . Density, the weight of things, their apparent resistance , have as little reality as images and sounds which appear on the screen of a computer generated « in reality » by lines of code (depending on the model Stephen Wolfram ) or mathematical forms (whichever the cosmologist Max Tegmark ) . Except that nothing would be « simulated » but given the screen and it would be our conscience. We would then, putting an indissoluble link between consciousness and information, change of terminology, as suggested by the engineer and UFO researcher Claude Lavat in an exchange that I had with him at Toulouse, and speak no more information but “cognition”.
 
These conjectures are staggering, even if they are only conjectures. Who can say that they have no direct impact on the understanding of the UFO phenomenon? They have the advantage of sticking to the most innovative work of the « official science  » and open the range of possibilities as to the origin of UFOs, origins long reduced to one hypothesis interplanetary travel , a good vision too classic (if not naive ) the overall structure of the universe and its inner essence . We must finish once and for all, with the alternative that has been too simplistic for decades to choose between the hypothesis psycho-reductionist and HET, assuming extra-planetary first degree, the one and the other without any discussion leading to dead ends.

It is not the purpose of this article to detail all the consequences that might be drawn from a physical information related to a theory of consciousness, in understanding that it could provide the UFO phenomenon. Suffice it to say here that work specifically on these issues are being called for public dissemination, without being bound by the secrecy of any  » invisible college » . It will be seen in the light of these publications and their receipt, if the title of the fifth paragraph,  » the new UFO  » was too presumptuous or otherwise relevant . This will , in our view, clearly more theoretical than that , in its origins, was content to describe , to assess the seriousness of witnesses and sometimes exhausting to look at them the sign of some alteration judgment or any dishonesty. The new UFO that we dream will be infinitely richer assumptions, theoretical possibilities, innovative concepts and therefore encourage more attention to the work of science rather than the torture of witnesses.
 
We will now learn to think in a single motion, matter and consciousness that perceives, intellectual approach that philosophers know and they called « idealism ». With the exception of a few common, such as materialism or empiricism, this approach is the main message of the whole history of philosophy from Plato to Kant, Hegel Berkeley , etc. For the secret of the « UFO mystery » lies in this equation when it comes back in the right order the items that comprise: Material, awareness, information and energy. For the approach we favor, energy and information are like two sides of the same coin. They exist only in and for consciousness and to manifest it as an experience of the subject.
So we do not tell us here that this approach favors a « mental conception» or psychological UFO phenomenon. The phenomenon is material, it can leave traces on the ground, radar echoes, and interact with our physical environment. But it is our environment itself has a mental component, and that is why it can undergo distortions that UFOs are sometimes subjected him, in defiance of the usual laws of our world, because they have mastered the setting and they have understood the profound essence.

From all the above, a conviction is necessary, I would express as follows: I firmly believe that, as proclaimed Aimé Michel , the day the UFO phenomenon has revealed all its mysteries, this disclosure will in effect human consciousness of a real  » psychic atomic bomb , » as changes in our perception and our understanding of reality will be. We all have a presentiment: the UFO issue only the tip of the iceberg, and hide in its depths something huge, gigantic , able to make us change scientific paradigm and even completely change methods and the approach of what we now call  » science. »
 
The prospect of seeing happen « physical information  » that would supersede or be based on the energy-matter , let us see , in fact, tremendous developments with incalculable consequences . Such physical , if it managed to establish its legitimacy , we finally provide the theoretical framework to reconcile within a unified science phenomena that have the blessing of the official investigation and « cursed areas, » all these facts hated the hints Fortean, the discharge of which the current human knowledge an area divided by a high wall , which separates the scientifically correct phenomena that are not citizenship within it. We could then finally access what might be called the  » Superscience  » of the future where perhaps science, metaphysics and spirituality finally rejoin . But we ‘re not there yet.