Thoughts As Mass

Here’s an essay by Stace Tussel that strives to link thought to mass and synchronicity to physics. You could say that it’s a rather weighty issue.

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An old friend asked me if I thought there might be a connection between fractals and synchronicity.  As we spoke I realised that our conversation was “fractalising,” or creating related branches of thought from which other little branches of thought sprouted, and so on.  I suddenly realised that our thoughts are capable of sending out dynamic neural impulses, resulting in cascading, near-infinite whorls of information exhibiting both independence and connectivity.

Now, in order to imagine how a “thought fractal” could be implicated in the seemingly-spontaneous creation of reality – which I think synchronicity quite effectively represents – we must agree that thought has mass, which is something we can’t prove, but we can imagine.  A thought fractal, or for that matter, any information fractal (e.g., in Mike’s post, one created and/or maintained and/or grown via the internet) would naturally increase in area, if not so much in size, just like any fractal does.

If we accept that thoughts have mass, we’ll also accept that a fractalising thought’s gravity would increase correspondingly.  The entire system of ideas or thought, and of each fractal “arm” within its matrix, would be an expansive area onto which outside information may be drawn by gravitational pull.  In other words, the more massive the thought fractal (i.e., the more complex – like an intense series of thoughts leading up to an epiphany, for instance, or the internet’s ever-growing reach and effect), the more likely that synchronicities, which are among reality’s most enigmatic creations, would result….

Synchronicity truly is a natural result of the scenario I’ve imagined, for all fractals return again and again to their original form. A Mandelbrot set, for example, starts out with a relatively simple shape, which becomes more complex through a series of chaotic manifestations of curves and angles, ultimately coming back to the exact form from whence it started, continuing on infinitely.  What I’m suggesting is that fractalised thought, through a similar process, draws toward it the very “ideas” or thoughts with which it began – thus, synchronicity.

As a very brief example, today at work I came across the last name “Roos.”  I often see names that are new or unusual, but in this case I spent a few extra moments thinking about the name – adding a bit of mass to the thought, perhaps – imagining that the surname might be pronounced “Rose.”  When, just this evening, reading a book published in 1966, considering this article that I’ve been so focussed on writing for hours, to read about an out-of-body experience by one Miss Roos didn’t come as a true surprise.

Once a thought begins to compartmentalise and branch off into new connections (much like the activity that takes place on the internet) it is thus “fractalised.”  The concept thereby becomes more massive, and its gravitational pull correspondingly strengthens – and sometimes this would conceivably result in a domino-effect cascade.  The source of the pulled-in information to which I refer is unknown; I can only imagine that it’s the product of some form of intelligence, innate or acquired.

That said, if we hold the concept that synchronicity may be a product of what we might call “the mass of thought,” we wouldn’t necessarily have to agree that synchronicity is exclusively caused by the gravity of dynamic information fractals, but only that gravity appears to play a role in some cases of synchronicity.

Likewise, intention isn’t a part of the equation.  Chaos reorders itself quite effectively without outside intervention.  I strongly feel that intention may distort or even completely disable, via an artificial attempt to insert order into chaos, a tendency toward synchronicity.  Yet, unlike mere coincidence, the unexpected collision of events in a meaningful way seems to involve more than mere chance.  Gravity seems to be a likely causal factor – but again, only if we allow ourselves to imagine that thought has mass.

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I wonder if some thoughts are heavier than others or is it all hot air? I guess the problem I would have with this modest theory is that it attempts to link synchronicity to causality, ie gravity in this case. In other words, Stace is looking for a way of explaining meaningful coincidence as part of our everyday world in which cause and effect, linear time, and three-dimensional travel rule. We prefer the concept of an underlying reality that exists outside of the everyday world, where everything is inter-connected in a great web of reality that doesn’t rely on the ordinary rules of physics.

But maybe I’ve got it all wrong and am fractally-impaired, and weighed down by my musings. If you found Stace’s essay interesting, you can read the second part here at Inter-Intelligence Communications.