When we gaze into the night sky or watch a sunrise, we experience a resonance with the sublime beauty of nature. But that resonance is hard to find when you’re waiting in line at the supermarket or interacting with ordinary objects.
Matter itself seems to be inert. If the field itself is conscious, that inertness seems like a problem. Rocks don’t think and tables don’t feel. Your stove has no inner world. Most material objects don’t appear to have an inner luminosity, they’re dark inside.
If the field is conscious, how do we get the solid, persistent objects of our shared external world from a luminous field? And how can we explain the things that appear to have no consciousness at all?
What solid means
If you sit on a rock it feels solid because it stops your body from moving further. But science tells us that nothing is actually in contact. What looks like solid matter consists of what most of us would call empty space.
What stops your body from moving is the force, not the solid matter of your body meeting the solid matter of the rock. The electrons in the rock push back against the electrons in your body. Just as a confined wave can only take certain distinct patterns, no two electrons can be pushed together into an identical pattern. Solid doesn’t mean packed full of stuff, it means pushes back.
That’s resistance, and resistance is what mass is: the harder something is to push, the more mass it has. Einstein’s e=mc2 tells us that energy and mass are one thing in two forms. You think your mass is the stuff of the particles of your body, but really it’s energy locked up inside every proton and neutron, holding each of them together. You are already mostly frozen energy that weighs something.
But light is ethereal, so could it ever be locked up like that? Think about what happens when light forms an optical vortex. A beam of light twists as it moves forward, forming a spiral, much like a whirlpool. The light beam is still there and still moving, but its motion is wound tightly around a central core.
But a vortex is fragile. A whirlpool can break apart, while matter is solid. A rock persists even if you kick it, it just sits there. Picture a vortex that’s wound tighter and tighter around its central core until it forms a knot. That frozen energy is what a knot of light is too.
It’s not static stuff, but energy locked into a shape so tightly it can’t come undone. A whirlpool can come apart, but a knot can’t. Wound into a knot is a picture of a pattern locked into holding its shape. Its pattern is so constrained, it’s frozen in place.
What does all this give us? A tightly knotted vortex holds its shape. It has persistence. It’s localised and stays in one place. And it resists being pushed. Persistent, localised and resistant. That’s what solid means.
From the outside, a stable, spatially fixed, resisting knot of activity is indistinguishable from a tiny pillar of matter. Which is roughly what a particle of matter is on this view. The field differentiates into regions of increasing density and constraint and these are real features of how the field is structured at that location.
We’ve already seen what frozen light looks like in physics. Hau’s light beam went dark inside her super-cold cloud. Its pattern was imprinted into the medium like a fingerprint in ice. Then it was revived intact. Matter, on this view, is what that same process would look like without the revival. It’s wound so tightly into its own structure that it can’t unfold back into the field.
Matter isn’t a pattern held within some other medium, it’s holding itself independently. A standing knot of luminosity, dark in its core, solid from the outside and resisting being moved. This is the frozen geometry of light.
Why there’s no one home
The knot helps us picture how a luminous field can seem solid from the outside. But what matter looks like from the outside is only half the puzzle, matter has no inside at all. A rock isn’t just solid, it has no inner perspective. There’s nothing it’s like to be a rock.
Think back to the individual subject. In that case the light was partially constrained. It was bound within the field, but the light wasn’t totally occluded. The boundary reflected its luminosity back inward, the light faces in. That inward light was its perspective, its bounded consciousness. The light still lights up its own interior. A subject is where a region of the field is partially constrained just enough to turn back in on itself and illuminate inside the boundary.
The vortex does the reverse. Instead of the light being constrained inwards, the tightening of the vortex constrains it to the outside. There’s no inward circulation of light, no inward reflection circling the inside of the boundary. There’s still a boundary, a difference in density between the vortex and the field, but the inside of the boundary is dark.
As the waves twist around the centre, they arrive out of sync and cancel each other out. This leaves the centre of the vortex occluded and dark, much like the hollow core of a whirlpool. The light beam is still there and still moving, but its motion is now wound so tightly around the core that none of the light reaches the centre. The core isn’t dark because the light has gone, but because the light has all been drawn outwards into the spiral. What is left is pure pattern, only the structure seen from the outside.
It’s important to be clear about what the knot metaphor shows and where it gives a misleading picture. When we imagine a knot we think of a rope, something solid being squeezed into a tight shape. But the dynamic field isn’t stuff, and its density was never more stuff packed into less space.
No matter how tightly you wind a rope, it still has an inside. But the inside here isn’t a location in space, the field itself is conscious so inside means the direction it’s facing. Notice your own consciousness right now, it’s facing toward these words. What isn’t included is dark to you, not because it’s ceased to exist, but because you’re not facing toward it.
Your consciousness is like a spotlight that illuminates some things and not others. The light and the direction it faces aren’t two different things. Consciousness is a point of view, which just means a direction you face. Your inner world is a beam of awareness that lights some things while the rest stays dark, not a room that’s illuminated on the inside.
This is what matter lacks. It’s not a space in the middle of the knot that’s dark, there’s no facing there at all. While you could turn and bring what’s now dark into your awareness, matter has no inside to turn.
Matter then, is pure exterior. It isn’t consciousness dimmed, less of it, or a simple form of it. It’s consciousness whose inward loop never closes, so nothing remains inside, which is why there’s nothing it is like to be a rock. It isn’t that the rock has some kind of proto-consciousness, the structure that allows an inner life has been completely closed. Wound shut. Matter isn’t the absence of consciousness, but what consciousness looks like when it’s become self-occluded.
We now have a picture of three modes within one dynamic and luminous field. The modes aren’t three distinct parts of a divided whole. They’re three positions on a single continuous dial. At one end of the dial the unconstrained field is fully self-luminous. The partially constrained field is luminous enough to light the interior and create a private individual point of view. At the matter end of the dial, movement is frozen. This is the maximum degree of constraint. Light folds entirely into its outer structure and nothing is lit within. One dynamic field under three degrees of constraint.
Featured image photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash
