Transcript from The International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL) conference call June 2023 discussing the topic of syntropy.

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Jeff Dunne: Welcome everyone. I am particularly excited for this topic because it’s something that has really become a central part of my life. There are two keynote speakers today, myself and Ulisse Di Corpo. For those who don’t know me, my name’s Jeff Dunne. It is a great pleasure to introduce Ulisse because, in addition to being a wonderful person, a wonderful speaker, he has been an incredibly influential figure in my life as it was through him and his book that I really started thinking about syntropy in a very serious way and recognising its role in my life.

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As such, he has become what I would think of as, syntropically, an amazing attractor in the course of how my life has progressed. And so the opportunity to share the stage with him is really an incredible honour. We’re going to talk about syntropy in a couple of different dimensions.

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To start, Ulisse will give you more of a technical background on it, some details about what it is. So we're gonna start with that question of what syntropy is. Ulisse is going to talk about that, but my focus is going to be more on the impacts and how it relates perhaps to some of the work that  Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (PEAR) and ICRL have done specifically on some of the aspects of this that reflect on the nature of spirituality and how spirituality and science really become more of a complimentary pair than opposing sides in a war in some sense that too many people have envisioned it to be.

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So to begin, Ulisse, can you maybe give us a little bit of background?

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Ulisse Di Corpo: Well, I’ll start from the beginning. I had the insight of syntropy in 1977 as a consequence of a very deep existential crisis I was in. I had spent one year in Missouri in the United States as an exchange student, and it was quite a tough experience.

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When I came back to Italy, I had these strong feelings of anxiety and depression that I couldn’t fit in my mechanistic view of life because I tried to explain everything as a consequence of matter and energy. And a friend from Iran, from Tehran, told me that in the Islamic religion, beside classical energy, there is another energy that propagates backward in time from the future to the past, and he associated that with a divine energy. 

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But the idea that besides classical energy there was a second type of energy started working in my mind, and I found out that in the fundamental equations of the universe, there is always a dual solution. For example, the equation that we all associate with Einstein, which is E =mc^2, is not really Einstein’s equation because it had been already published before by Oliver Heaviside in 1890 and by Henri Poincaré in 1900 and by Olinto De Pretto in 1903. Olinto de Pretto was a friend of the father of Einstein. And it seems that the equation arrived to Einstein in this way, but there was a problem with the equal E =mc^2 equation because it didn’t consider the speed of objects, the momentum.

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So what Einstein did, he added the momentum to the equation and it became energy squared, and it needed the square root to find the solution. So the solution of energy was a positive time energy and a negative time energy. At the beginning of the last century, there was a big conflict among physicists because some of them, like Dirac Kline, Gordon and others, were following this dual solution of the equations, but the mainstream physicist instead didn’t accept this dual solution because that meant that besides causality, there was another type of causality acting from the future.

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This model was very useful for me because it made me understand what depression and anxiety were. And because it had a very deep impact, I decided to develop it in the field of psychology. Although I was very gifted in physics and mathematics, no one was really interested in this theory because the idea that you have an energy that propagates backward in time was considered nonsense. I then went on developing this theory in the field of statistics, because you can divide the techniques and statistics like a classical causality and this other type of super-causality, which is parametric and non-parametric statistics. 

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And when the Dean of the Faculty of Statistics saw my thesis, he said this is the theory of syntropy, of Fantappie. I didn’t know anything about Luigi Fantappie, but he was a famous mathematician of the last century. But his theory of syntropy had always been censored. What Fantappie found out was that, starting with the mathematical properties of the forward-in-time energy, and the backward-in-time energy, the forward-in-time energy was governed by the law of entropy and described the material world, whereas the backward-in-time energy had the properties of life. It took energy to concentrate, increase complexity, differentiation, structure. 

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So he wrote a small book entitled The Unitary Theory of the Physical and Biological World, in which he said the physical world is a manifestation of the forward-in-time energy, which is governed by entropy, whereas the biological world is a manifestation of the backward-in-time energy, which is governed by the law of syntropy. The word syntropy comes from Greek, in which syn means converging and tropos, tendency. So the idea of Fantappie was that life is converging towards attractors. We have causes acting from the past and attractors acting from the future, and we live in between causes and attractors. We live in a super-causal world and free will would be a consequence of this, of the fact that we continuously have to choose if we want to follow causes or attractors. 

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Well still, even if the Dean of the Faculty of Statistics was very interested, he was enthusiastic about my work, no one else was interested. And so in 1996, I wrote a novel trying to describe this model. And the only group that became interested was the Sai Baba group, which is an Indian, spiritual group. And then coincidences started happening. In 2001, I married Antonella Vannini. She decided to go back to university. She got her degrees and her PhD degree. And the key work that she did was, if syntropy flows from the future to the past, the systems that support the basic life functions – for example, the autonomic neural system – should respond in advance to future stimuli. So she started doing experiments with stimuli, which were emotional and non-emotional, neutral, and measuring the heart rate and skin conductance and their reaction, and the stimuli reaction was just amazing. You didn’t need any kind of statistics to see it, because it could be seen with the naked eye. 

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And so she developed several experiments in this field, obtaining incredible results. But we were amazed by the reaction from the academia, which was really extremely violent. They didn’t want to know anything about this backward-in-time causality, and they tried to expel Antonella from the academy. And when she asked to discuss her PhD in front of the national commission, not one of her tutors – she had a quantum physicist and cognitive psychologist – came to the discussion. She was totally abandoned, and we were just amazed because we thought that the idea that there is another kind of causality acting was such a great idea. Then some people came and just told me I had to stop working on this theory in a quite violent way, but I continued and then we were censored on Wikipedia.

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If you look for syntropy in Wikipedia, in all possible languages, there is no page. It’s not possible to build a page in Wikipedia. It reverts to entropy, which is a totally different concept because the key element of syntropy is that there is this backward-in-time flow of energy, whereas in entropy, time is considered only in the classical way. And so we were just amazed by this difficulty in publishing in the scientific journals in the Western world. Strangely, in the Islamic world, we have been able to publish about syntropy. So there is something about our Western world that doesn’t want this idea to come through. Well, we went on working in many different ways on syntropy, and we established a contact with Robert John and Brenda Dunn in 2005, and it has been very productive, and so this is what we’re doing now.

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JD: One of the beautiful things about that is that it fits so beautifully with all of the research that the PEAR has done over the years in doing experiments that started with asking the question, “Can I affect a system?” And the answer being, yes you can. 

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Does it matter if it’s electrical or mechanical or thermal or anything of that nature? Doesn’t matter. Well, what other dimensions could you play with in that? Does it matter if I’m sitting right next to the device? What if I’m sitting on the other side of the room? What if I’m sitting in another room? What if I’m in another building? What if I’m in another country? It doesn’t matter. And then, of course, the natural extension of that is, “What if I try to affect that system from the future? What if I tried to affect it in the past?” It doesn’t matter. The effect is still there. And that’s a very difficult thing to explain. 

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I saw a little note, Josh asking what are we going to get to the idea of it and what the idea is in the future? Well, but this is the idea of syntropy. And when you start thinking about this in terms of a universe that is not tied explicitly to a single direction of time, it offers a lot of answers and a lot more satisfying and simpler answers than you can craft in a universe that has information and energy only flowing in one direction. 

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The idea that this is an interplay across time, that there are influences both from the past and the future on a particular thing, whatever that thing is, is a very natural explanation and consequence of the research that was being done. It’s quite sensible. Now it requires looking at it from a different perspective, because of these questions, but what does it mean if I’m going to try to affect a system that generated data a week or a year ago? If I am changing something in the past, what does that mean? This, inherently, is a question tied to the nature of time itself, and with an assumption that things only flow in one direction. So having a syntropic compliment to this entropic way of looking at the world is a very powerful answer.

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For me, one of the most exciting aspects of this is that when you think about something that is a future attractor, that is really a purpose towards which we are going, it leads you to ask the question, “What does it mean to be a purpose?” And I think there are two different ways of looking at this.

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One possibility is to envision a purpose as being something that’s entirely within one’s own self. When I think through that, I find it very difficult to justify that way of looking at things because the idea of an individual consciousness or an individual person who has some kind of future purpose that is not in any way connected to anything else in the universe – then there’s no relative purpose of anything if it is not going towards something that has some meaning or connection to anything else that’s out there.

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So for me, the only real logical way of envisioning what this might mean is that a purpose is a connection between yourself and other things. And what that then implies is that these purposes are across people and this becomes inescapable, or leads to an inescapable conclusion, which is that we are interconnected and this is a statement of that interconnectivity. We’re interconnected in terms of having purposes that are entwined together. That’s not the same thing as saying we don’t have free will, and that’s a different aspect of this, but rather that we’ve got a connection that exists in the future in terms of how our purposes draw us together and how they play together.

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And of course, our purposes, or our interconnection in the past, is in terms of things that have happened that have impact on multiple things. So we’re interconnected in both directions, in both ways of looking at this problem. And that interconnectivity then represents the fact that we are an unextractable part of something that is bigger than ourselves.

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For several hundred years, as science has sort of pushed us to this idea of a mechanistic world – a world that has this objectivity that’s fundamental to the way that is being understood – at this point, we’re saying that can’t be the only answer. There is an interconnectedness that goes beyond a mechanistic interconnectedness of atomic motion or something to that effect. And that’s the essence of spirituality. We are pieces of something that is larger than ourselves. And as such, I think it, it only makes sense to look at science and spirituality as two aspects of the larger picture. 

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Again, I’m glancing over why people connect – that is exactly the point, right? And it is not just a question of interconnectedness between two human beings or 10 human beings, or 8 billion human beings, but is interconnectedness with everything, right? Because these purposes don’t just extend specifically to human consciousness, but rather to all kinds of consciousness.

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Now, my personal take on this is that there’s some aspect of consciousness literally in everything, even if we don't think of it necessarily as being the sort of an organism, the way that we normally talk about it. So there’s humans who have consciousness. My cat has consciousness. Everything has consciousness. Rocks have their own form of consciousness. The planet has its own consciousness, the solar system, all of these different things. Some of them are similar enough that I can recognise common traits in them, other people, animals and so forth.

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Some of them are of such substantially different nature that I’m not sure exactly how to write it out. The idea of the number two, does that have consciousness? What would that look like? Well, it’s pretty different from what my consciousness is, and it’s very difficult to paint that picture. But I think there’s something that’s very exciting here in the idea of syntropy. It feels to me like that idea is starting to grab hold in our culture. People are not responding the same violent way that Ulisse described, ”This cannot be the case” kind of reactionary insecurity that was driving people a long time ago. It does seem to be that we’re on the cusp of a new way society seems to be adapting to this. Ulisse, have you had that sense as well in recent times that that attitude seemed to be changing? 

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UD: Well, yes. I have this feeling and I see that there is a deeper existential crisis among people. People are searching for deeper answers.

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The reason why it was so important for me, this theory of syntropy, is that when we are going towards the attractor, towards the purpose, syntropy converges. It’s converging energy inside us, and we feel warmth and wellbeing in the area of the autonomic nervous system. When instead we’re not converging towards our purpose, we feel emptiness, cold and suffering in this area of the body. So it’s like if we have a compass that is telling us if we are going towards the purpose or we are going somewhere else, and if we want to experience wellbeing and happiness, the key element is to learn to converge towards the purpose.

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Now, at this moment, I see that so many people are suffering. There is an incredible level of anxiety, and this means that people have not found their purpose. What they teach us, what they tell us is that life is a consequence of chance and has no purpose. Instead, syntropy says that life is finalised, is future-oriented, and there is a purpose and a meaning in life. Surely everyone has a different purpose. And so we have to explore and find what is our direction. But in the end, the final attractor will be the same for everyone.

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I have appreciated the works of Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard de Chardin found that in palaeontology, you’re not able to see Darwin’s theory of chance and errors. And you see species that are converging towards attractors. And so he said that the final attractors, the Omega point towards which all the forms of life are evolving, are guided by these emotions of love moving in this direction.

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So, this was the first implication that impacted me, and I tried to develop in the field of psychology with little result when I did this work, but I’m still working on it. And in many different ways, because I think there is also a totally new approach towards what is health and healing, when you follow this idea of purpose and attractors.

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JD: There are a lot of questions I’ve been glancing over in the chat, which are fantastic questions. One, which I wanted to mention, is the question of whether or not this is just a way of casting, a way of experiencing things that are still explained traditionally versus just having to take the ideas of this on faith, or something to that effect. I don’t think that's the case, as in a lot of the experiments Antonella had done before, there were obviously a lot of cases where you’re looking back at, for example, an event and say, is there something syntropic about this? 

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For example, when I was younger, I made some decisions. And I look at that and I say, that doesn’t seem like the kind of decision that I would have made at that time. Why did I choose that as opposed to anything else that would’ve just been much more in line with my character and my personality and so forth, and following along the various paths. Well, that decision turned out to be a very central one. It led me to the place where I am right now, which I think is a very good place. There‘s something that feels very syntropic about that. And I do believe that that is a syntropic effect, that we’re looking at things that are causing you to make a decision that leads you in the in the right direction, or in the case of making decisions that aren’t really taking you in the right direction, that result in the kind of anxiety that Ulisse was mentioning before.

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But still, you look at that and you say, “Well, I can make that case.” But if you hadn’t made that decision, you would’ve been at a different point in your life now, and you might be looking back on it saying exactly the same thing. And so is it real, but experiments where you’ve looked at events where you’re getting a response prior to the existence of a cause – for example, I have a galvanic skin response to an event that doesn’t exist at the time when the response exists, which you can’t explain as just a matter of perspective. 

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That’s a real consequence of something, and then particularly a consequence of something that is about to happen. And to me, that takes this into a very different stage of things, which I think is particularly exciting – in other words, it really is a very hard piece of scientific evidence that says this is not perceptual. It’s not just a way of thinking about things, but this is a consequence of real things that are having real impacts. And the same way, it helps you to explain, for example, why you can have a real impact on something that has happened in the past, as was seen in the pair experiments, that otherwise wouldn’t have made any sense in the traditional way. 

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UD: I see a question about synchronicities, and while syntropy and synchronicities relate strongly because the idea that was put forward by Jung was that there is this continuum of space and time, and you have synchronicities that act from the future and causes that act from the past, the problem with syntropy is that we cannot see the future. We are aware of the past, of causes, but the syntropic world is invisible to us. 

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For example, one of the ideas about gravity is that gravity is energy that propagates backward in time. And that is the reason why we cannot see gravity. And that is the reason why gravity would be non-local – it would be instantaneous. In a way, syntropy works in the same way. There is a visible world and an invisible world.

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Life energy is linked to this invisible world, and it manifests in our life. And one of the ways we manifest is through synchronicities. Synchronicities have been key in my path towards syntropy. They have been very important.

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JD: So this is an unusual ICRL meetup, as normally we have a talk, but some of the questions that have been coming in the chat have been so interesting and riveting that I think we shouldn’t constrain ourselves necessarily to the traditional format for meetups. Much better to adapt to what people are interested in and respond to that. 

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Let me take a branch from the way we normally do these things then, and offer the following. I’m going to take us out of this pinned view where we two are the main boxes you’ll see and invite people to raise their hands. I don’t want this to become crazy with everyone speaking at the same time. And since there is a lot of interest in it, if you have questions that you want to raise, put them in the chat. Continue to do that. Or raise your hand using the reactions, if you’re familiar with how to do that. And then we’ll be able to introduce you and have you ask questions in real time as well. We’ll try to take everything in order. 

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So to start, we’ll jump right into Russ’s question. But before this, I just want us to recognise that it’s not like these ideas came up in the last 50 years or in the last 500 years. The idea of this is something that has been talked about for the whole history of humanity. So there’s nothing we’re talking about here that hasn’t been brought up many times over thousands of years. 

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Okay, Russ, go ahead. 

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Russ: Yeah. Hey, thanks so much. So, the first thing I’d like to ask you for is an example of what you think of as probably one of the most compelling examples of syntropy. And then the second thing, which is probably a part of that is, are you suggesting that the second law of thermodynamics is broken? Or are you not suggesting that going back in time goes back to a state of more order? That’s my question. 

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JD: Great question. Ulisse, do you want to answer this? 

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UD: Well, when you add syntropy to the model of thermodynamics, you need to add new loads.

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One idea is that in a diverging world like our universe, entropy prevails. But in a converging world, yes it reverses the time and we go towards a concentration of energy and an increase of complexity. So probably the thermodynamics that we are using now is just a limited part of what thermodynamics should be. It should be expanded 

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JD: And to add on to that, another aspect of that is to really think about what it means to go backwards in time and what it is that is going backwards in time. Whether you’re thinking about it as a physical object that goes backwards in time, sort of in a Hollywood sense, versus an awareness that goes backwards in time in a cognitive sense, that becomes an important player in figuring out what that means.

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UD: What we’re seeing in experiments is that what flows backward in time are emotions, and usually emotions are not associated with information. We feel an emotion that attracts us in a direction, but we don’t know why it is attracting us in that direction. So the very difficult element in this game between entropy and syntropy is that with entropy, we have the certainty of the past that we can see. 

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With syntropy, we have these strong emotions that tell us to go in a direction, but in a way it’s an act of faith that we follow when we follow syntropy. When you start following your emotions, you learn that there are several rules in it. And so they can be used in a very positive and beneficial way. On one side we have our physical senses, and on the other side where the feeling of the future, we feel the future.

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Russ: So, so without getting into the detailed question of something like, so you’re not describing matter, you’re describing something else, because you’d referred to emotion. I don’t want to get that into that detail because that conversation could probably go on for quite a while. But so are you suggesting that the examples of syntropy are really mind-based rather than hard, physical-based? Is that what you are putting out here? 

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UD: I would say that we have the mind, if you associate the mind to the head, that is more linked to the physical perception of energy, so to entropy. Whereas the syntropic perception is more linked to the autonomic nervous system, what people usually call the heart.

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So we would be constantly in the middle of choosing if we want to follow what the head tells us or what the heart is telling us. One possibility is that probably consciousness following this model is not in the head, but would be in the heart. And this was a widespread idea in the past. For example, in Egypt, they were keeping the heart because it was considered to be the seat, the place of consciousness.

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But yes, my idea is that there is a constant gain between the head and the heart, between the past and the future. And we need to learn how to get the best from each one. 

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JD: But also to add to that, it’s important to note that this is what is the driving influence of things? This isn’t just an emotional thing.

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For example, one of the experiments that was done is if you’re staring at a screen and you have four squares on that screen, and you decide what square you think this particular image is going to be behind, and you pick it, what that’s shown is that you have a different response from choosing correctly versus choosing incorrectly. The response is different, right? 

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And so you decide where it is, you click on it, and then you find out, was I right or was I wrong? And if you were right, you have one type of response. If you were wrong, you have a different type of response. But what the study showed was that you were registering that response not only prior to when the answer was revealed, but prior to when the answer was even set. So the calculations that determined which square it was behind happened later than your response began.

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Russ: Jeff, how was that measured? I mean, that’s physiologically, right? 

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JD: I mean, you have instruments that measure it. That’s what I’m talking about. 

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Russ: Yeah. But, but how did it, I mean, was there a break? How did they measure? I mean, I don’t want to belabour the point; I just can’t understand how you would validate that that happened within the mind. That the mind knew that before the event was even generated. I don’t understand that.

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JD: But that was the experiment, right? You, you monitor somebody, and you can time when the responses are. So you have, you have a measured time spectrum on it, but let’s not dive into the specifics of one experiment. Okay Josh, why don’t you go ahead,

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Josh: So you got me thinking about the subject. A few weeks ago, I wrote to Julia Mossbridge, who I think has done more than anybody in recent times to investigate causal effects in psychology. And she referred me to a review paper by her and by Dean Radin. And from there I found the work of Helmut Schmidt, who did a whole lot of this work from 1970 to 2011 when he died. And there’s a John Walker who has a whole website called Fourmilab – that’s the French word for ant, and it’s a pun on Fermilab in Geneva where these guys worked – and they had this alternate site with wild, far-out stuff on a website called fourmilab.com. There’s so much here. Schmidt found positive results in 1970. But Walker, who was doing this huge experiment with many, many subjects online in the 21st century, found null results overall using the human mind to affect things that happened in the past.

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So I want to put forward a conceptual framework for thinking about this. Your mother pioneered these experiments in the ’80s and ’90s where you create a bias in quantum noise by biassing a number you see on the screen. And that was done forward in time. You try to make the numbers on the screen higher or lower, and that effect was overwhelmingly significant. Five or sometimes six sigma, depending on how you measure it. There’s no doubt that they proved that effect. So this is affecting random numbers that haven’t been generated yet. Now, suppose you generate these numbers in the past with the same quantum random device, and you record them on a tape, or you record them in computer memory, and then you try to affect them later.

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According to Schmidt, there’s just as much ability of humans to affect this data that was generated in the past, which is the first level. Amazing. And now I’m proposing, suppose you add the layer where somebody looks at this data in between the time that it was recorded and the time that you tried to change it. Would you notice that the numbers are peculiar? And then try to change it? So this leads to the logical incompatibility, or the logical paradox, that you’d have to face if the fourth step is realised. 

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All right, so you look at this data and you say, “In this segment, the data was skewed towards the negative”, and you put somebody in front of the screen and you say, “Try to skew this data toward the positive.” Well, it’s already happened and you’ve already seen it, and you’re asking him to make it positive when it was negative. And at that point, I’d say it’s probably not going to work. But where along the way in these four steps does the process fail? And that to me is an interesting question. And maybe it’ll tell us something about the nature of the quantum measurement effect and its relationship to consciousness. So there’s my speech.

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JD: I think you’ve raised a fantastic point. And some of that has been done – for example, having it recorded in the past and trying to affect it later, and then going back. One of the pieces of this whole puzzle is the state of uncertainty that exists about that information.

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One thing that I don’t know was ever done was the question of if I record data or – before I get into that, I’ll say I don’t think anybody’s ever suggested that, for example, when you generate the data, it becomes a thing and then in the future you attempt to affect it, that it is changing between the time that it was recorded and when you tried to affect it. I don’t think there was anybody who had suggested the number had originally been 107, but now it’s 93. I think everybody sort of said whatever it was, the value that it was, was that, but it had that effect. I don’t know that anybody tried to have somebody try to affect the data after someone who was completely unconnected had looked at the data and decided that this data was one thing or another without communicating it to somebody else and then having that person try to affect it and see what the kind of results that is. 

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Josh: Exactly. That’s a very interesting experiment. 

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JD: And to me, what’s interesting about it is that one of the important aspects of whether or not one has an effect is the level of uncertainty that is in one’s own mind regarding the ability to have an effect. 

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So you mentioned at the beginning that there were people who tried to replicate certain experiments from various people – and that’s the same thing that happened in Pair, right? And people said, yeah, “I’ve done the same thing that Pair did. And there was no response, there’s no result. There was no effect. So I’ll use the canonical example of this, the one that Brenda would give if she were here, which is, it’s true that that did happen.

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But what the people found was that when you went and you looked at how people ran those other experiments, it was often the case that it started with people sitting the operators down and saying, “Well, some people think that you can affect a system just by thinking about it, and we’re gonna see whether you can,” – well, of course it didn’t work, right?

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I mean, they established the impossibility of it in the mind of the operator before the operator ever had a chance to try it. And as a consequence, there was no effect. The role of your own understanding and your own belief and what realm of uncertainty you are able to operate in plays an incredibly important role in this.

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So what would be a fascinating experiment to run, that I don’t know was ever done, is to take a case where you just doing just what, what you described Josh, and you run the data, somebody else looks at it, and then somebody later tries to have an effect on it, see what that is, and then you do the same thing, but you tell the person that somebody else has already looked at it and see whether or not the effect is still there. So how much of that is in one’s mind? I think it would be a fascinating experiment to run. So, yeah, it’s a great comment. 

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Vasilio, do you want to go ahead and speak?

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Vasilio: Thanks ICRL, for everything. Every time you speak and you give out the account of what has happened, for me it’s fascinating. I have heard it many times and every time I hear it, it’s a source of information and insight, so thank you for that. 

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Now, touching on the subject of the second law of thermodynamics, I can kind of relate to that since I had been working on it for some time in my professional life. The second law of thermodynamics works only for closed systems, and it was the work of Fantappie that influenced the thinkers that they were trying to extend the second law of thermodynamics, mainly one of my tutors, who extended this entropy maximisation principle to the production of entropy for open systems, which allowed for self-organisation and emerging 

phenomena.

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So that was a breakthrough mainly considering these attractors that exist somewhere, that drive systems store. And this is a crucial thing because in physics, in the very hardcore formulation of classical physics and quantum mechanics, you have this teleological argument that is called ‘the minimisation of least action’ or other names. So it’s a little technical, but what it means is that the system is driven by its future, something which is not very well accepted in mainstream studies and ideologies. And we prefer the other, the other version where the initial conditions will determine what’s going to happen.

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So the question of what is the attractor that I saw in the comments, it’s a mathematical being that appears very often in the theory of non-linear dynamics of open systems. The attractor of a closed system is death – it is complete entropy and uniform, nothing else. The attractor of an open system is full of patterns and full of things becoming, of stuff going on. So this is my little contribution to the discussion. 

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I think that we’re living now in a time where at the moment, sooner or later, we have to acknowledge and study what these attractors mean for open systems.

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And Kaufman, for example, has been on this for many years. Other people also have been or are actively working on that. There are interpretations of retro casualties and the transaction theory in the quantum mechanics version of this action principle. So there are things that are moving on, but the main obstacle is the judges, and we do things as we have been doing them, ignoring the fact that there is a purpose in the universe. And this is not just going to change. 

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JD: That’s beautiful. Hey, Ulisse, do you have any thoughts? I don’t know what to add to that. It’s a beautiful description. Ulisse, did you have any? 

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UD: Well, besides talking about attractors, we can also talk about emitters and absorbers and it is a game. All the universe is a game of emitters and absorbers, and absorbers would be attractors working from the future, whereas emitters would be causes working from the past.

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Feynman was corresponding with Luigi Fantappie, and this idea of emitters and absorbers was in a way a translation of entropy and syntropy, which was suggested by Fantappie to Feynman. And so we can see this game in many different ways, but also in old traditions like yin and yang in the eastern tradition or Shiva Shakti, we always have these two elements playing together and they’re part of a unity.

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If you see at the equations, the energy momentum mass equation, energy is a unity, but it has these two components. One is entropic and one is syntropic. We cannot divide entropy from syntropy; they must always be playing together. The problems we have are when one side prevails above the other, and at this moment in our culture, the entropic side is prevailing.

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So I think that talking about syntropy could be in a way useful to balance this situation. 

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Vasilius: I am exactly at this point in Jeff's book, The Nexus, chapter 15. So I’m looking forward to how it’s going to end, but thank you again. 

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JD: Wonderful. Thanks. And just as a quick thing, to Elizabeth who put in the Shiva Shakti notes in there – thank you for contributing to that. It’s an analogy that Brenda, that my mother, always referred back to in these respects, and I think it is a beautiful one as well. Joanne, do you want to go ahead?

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Joanne: So, hi, this has been wonderful. I’ve been studying Ken Wilbur’s Integral Theory for a long time, and some themes in what we’re talking about converge with that. I’ll presume there’s some knowledge and understanding of Wilbur’s model.

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But in particular to this working through and talking of data, models, epistemology and paradigms. Starting at the beginning, Ulisse, you talked about the separation, the suffering of separation in this materialistic, naturalistic world that people are experiencing.

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As a psychologist, we’re working with a lot of people over a long time, and it’s a common theme – I didn’t make up this term – of democratisation of religion, where people say, “I’m spiritual but not religious. I don’t know how to put my science together with my spirituality.” And I think that ties in with what you’re both talking about. 

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So one part of Wilbur’s theory that’s been helpful to me, and I’d like to know if you agree or disagree with it, is that I think there’s a question of what does this mean for our lives? Especially for me and emotionality. And I think emotions have been given short shrift in, in integral theory. To me, it’s pretty cognitive. 

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But here’s my question: it seems as though it’s states of consciousness – gross, subtle, causal – that come from Eastern religions. It’s not just from Wilbur, he just pulled it together. We’ve got a David Bohm model there. And my question is that it seems to me like there’s a sort of veil between the states of consciousness. The way Wilbur puts it, which is succinct, is there’s consciousness bodies – like gross, subtle, causal consciousness; gross, subtle, causal bodies; gross, subtle, causal realms. And my experience is that there are veils between them. And that what I feel like I’m trying to do is say, here’s the veils, or get through them or join my gross waking consciousness with all the subtler realms and beings and such. So I’m looking to both of you for any comments you have. 

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JD: Sure. Thanks. I have some thoughts, but I feel like I’ve been talking and talking and talking and listening. Do you want to say anything, Ulisse? 

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UD: Well, I’ve been experimenting lately on myself. I see a comment here on the chart about pranic healing, which was something I was very sceptical about. Then I started working on this life energy that you can call the pranic energy, because I have a problem with glaucoma in my eye, and I have found it incredibly beneficial. So I started studying books about how to handle this life energy, this pranic energy. And lately I had a toothache and the pain was just devastating, and I started using these pranic healing techniques and it just disappeared totally. 

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So this is a field where I’m starting to develop my work with syntropy, and I see that our consciousness is strictly related to life energy and that we can use it in ways that we didn’t have any idea before would be possible. And I’m trying to experiment with how this energy and the level of consciousness that you can develop about this life energy can be used to heal yourself or be beneficial for others. 

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JD: When you asked that, I found myself thinking back on an interesting aspect of my own life. I have always been a very holistic-minded person. I like to immerse myself in the totality of things. I went to graduate school for physics explicitly to learn other skills. I wanted to know how those reductionists think about it. But one of the problems that I’ve always faced – and I think a lot of holistic-minded people have – is that you ask what feels like a simple question and you’re like, oh, well, before I can answer that, I have to take a step back. But that means I’ve got to take another step back and another step back before you realise it. Like the question is, “Do you want pizza for dinner?” And you’re 45 minutes into an explanation of everything. 

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And at some point you have to draw these lines and say, well, all right, I’ve got to stop here. And you draw these lines that eventually sort of scope out what it is that you care about. And I think mentally, right from the very beginning – infant or maybe even before – you start to put those lines in as a matter of practicality. And you say, this is what I’m willing to pay attention to at the moment. And I think those are what become the veils you’re talking about – that becomes that piece that you feel the obligation to pierce because you’ve set this up for practical reasons. 

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And then either you’ve decided that the practical wasn’t enough and you need to go beyond that, or perhaps your life circumstances put you somewhere else where those are no longer practical for what it is you’re trying to be or do in the state that you’re in. And now you’re put in that position where you’ve got to pierce that veil and go beyond what has become an instinctive way of categorising things. 

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And I think what’s so challenging about it is because you’re so used to it. It’s not a conscious thing anymore. You’ve laid out the boundaries of what is, and you then fill in the blanks with your universe, your way of thinking, your experience with pizza, whatever it is, like that becomes a thing. So yes, just to highlight what you’re saying, I think it’s a real thing, but that’s the way that I tend to think about it. 

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Joanne: Thank you. That’s great. 

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JD: Okay Sumo, go ahead.

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Sumo: Hi, thanks for the wonderful discussion. I have two questions: One, to Ulisse, is this in any way related to retro-causal quantum theory? And two, are you able to represent an attractor mathematically? If so, what sort of maths does it use? 

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UD: Well, if you look at the energy momentum emancipation, the two solutions are very clear.

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On one side you have causality, and on the other side you have attractors. But working on this model, you realise that causality in a way is stupid. It’s mechanical. Whereas attractors develop forms of organisations that are always more complex and intelligent. So my impression is that we receive intelligent information through attractors through the future. Our experience arrives at the attractor, which processes the information, keeping only what is beneficial for life. And then it spreads this information to all the other individuals that are linked to the attractor. 

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The idea of evolution that comes from this model is totally different from the idea of evolution that we have nowadays, because it's as if everyone is contributing to the development of the attractor and the attractor is spreading the information.

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But it also means that since the attractors are non-local – say, the attractors human beings to which we are linked – could be shared in other parts of the universe. And so, for example, if we had contact with aliens, they might just seem very similar to human beings. So, the idea of the attractor is something that is in a different kind of space time. It is extremely intelligent. It processes information that is linked to attractors, and these attractors provide us with the information for our evolution. And if the species dies, the attractor remains there. And it means that if conditions come back again for a species to emerge, the information is already available.

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One of the points, or there are several points, is that syntropy is typical of the quantum world, and the question was how does syntropy propagate from the quantum micro world to the macro physical world? This transition is allowed by water – by the hydrogen bond in the water molecules. So one key element for syntropy to show in our physical world is water. And this is the reason why water is so important for life. I would stop here at the moment 

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JD: And can you address the second question too? 

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Sumo: That’s amazing. Is your work related in any way to retro-causal quantum theory?

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UD: Yes, it is linked to it. Now we are not working anymore on retro causality because the effects were so strong and so clear that we consider retro causality to be a fact. And we are trying to see how this model can be applied in the various different fields because, in my opinion, besides the psychological field of wellbeing and suffering, there are applications in healing, but also application in the social models and how society should progress towards its purposes. 

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Maybe because of this, I don’t know, but with Antonella we’ve made a very deep change in our life this year. We have moved from Rome to a small village in the mountains in central Italy at 1,400 metres of altitude. It is incredible the change in the quality of life that we have experienced. And we think that this kind of change might propagate in the future the kind of model of how people live will change. 

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Sumo: Got it. Got it. Thank you. Thank you very much. 

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JD: And in fact, that last comment that Ulisse just made, I think in, in some way ties to the last comment in the chat: Does this tie to Sheldrake’s morphic resonance?

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If we are recognising that all of these things are fundamentally interconnected, then yeah, it really has to in some way. I don't know that it’s a direct synonymous statement of the two. But for example, the idea that you were connected to those things around you, beyond just what your atom collisions would suggest, says that in the same way that you are affected by living outside the city versus inside the city is the same way that you’re going to be connected, to some extent, to other humans in other societies or civilisations around the world at some level as well.

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Do other folks have any additional questions at this moment?

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Josh: Well, I’ll speak again if I may have the floor. I think we’re living in a time when our institutions are falling apart, when humanity and the planet are finding a new relationship because the old one really isn’t working. And what do you think about an attractor in our near future that is guiding us in creating a new relationship with Gaia, which humanity and the planet so desperately need?

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UD: Well, I live in Rome, or I lived in Rome until last year, which is a beautiful town and Jeff will come here in July and you will see it. But the problem with towns is that the relation with nature is just, in a way, ruined. 

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What I see with people in Rome is that even if you live in a beautiful town, people are suffering from loneliness. They’re not connected, whether the connection with nature is very poor. And instead, going to a mountain village, we always have each day in each month a connection Gaia, with nature. And that is incredibly beneficial. I think that Italy will have to experience this flow from the big towns to the small villages. And it is not easy because you need some kind of courage to do it or, um, but when you do it, you start appreciating it. So we need to change our habits, certainly. 

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JD: Just to put a little parenthetical at the end, to the point about what this means for us in terms of a species, the desire to continue to survive is a pretty strong attractor, right? And it may very well be that the only way that we’re going to make it through this is if we start to change our mindset about what we are in connection to the rest of the world. That at some subtle, fun, foundational level, the human spirit recognises that if we continue on in this same way, we’re steering towards a wall here, and it’s going to come to an end, hopefully motivating us at some level to open up our minds to other ways of looking at things.

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Rosanna: I was thinking about a variety of things in this conversation. I apologise for not being a physicist, because I can’t speak to the second law of thermodynamics very well, but since your mom and Roger started these meetings, I have tried to attend as many times as possible. 

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I’m working a lot right now on duality versus non-duality and perceptions, as in Donald Hoffman. I don’t know if anybody here knows who Donald Hoffman is, but he’s a mathematician and he has worked a lot with the idea that we don’t see much of our environment through our physical eyes that we might see otherwise. Through evolution, we have become only aware of a certain amount of stuff that is actually available to our physical eyes. And if you forgive the expression, in our monkey brain. Beyond that, It seems like there’s a lot going on, and I’m totally with you on this idea of time running both ways and maybe everything happening at once.

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We can’t really conceptualise everything happening at once. So as physical beings with the monkey brain, we’ve got to move forward in time. Okay? So I know I’m getting somewhere with this. I hope I haven’t left everybody in the dust somewhere. 

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JD: You got that holistic thing going, okay, but you’re good.

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Rosanna: But I strongly feel as though there is a whole class of entities or beings around us that we can’t actually perceive, and they may have a lot of effect on us. As in, they may have their own emitters, in a way. 

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I’m trying to rationalise the difference of being in a physical body and therefore belonging to the earth like all the rest of the creatures on the earth, like my cats and the birds and trees outside. And we’re all going back to the earth, which we’re intrinsically involved with on the physical level. But on the non-physical – the spiritual, if you will, or metaphysical level – we’re all one with everything. So there is that dualistic kind of thing, which is what I’m hitting upon constantly. I just wondered if Jeff or Ulisse might have some comment, or anybody else, on that concept. And now I’m going to shut up. 

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UD: So your point is duality or non-duality. I understand. Well, entropy and syntropy are part of a unity. So it’s a non-duality, but at the same time, they manifest as a duality. So there’s these two aspects of life, but when they manifest as a duality, they are always linked together. On one side, you see entropy. On the other side you see syntropy. So you cannot consider entropy separately from syntropy. I wouldn’t say that you have to choose non-duality instead of duality, because they’re all part of the same design. We have non-duality and duality, which play together.

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JD: My apologies, because I actually had a thought on this and I’ve lost it because I was trying to fix an audio issue, which was one of the downsides of being a host on a Zoom chat, and trying to actually be engaged at the same time. 

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Elizabeth: In terms of the duality, non-duality, and was it Rosanna, you were talking about that in terms of reconciling the physical world and the animal world with the human consciousness.

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Rosanna: Not exactly, but go ahead. Spirituality – I was trying to work with the things the emitters or the attractors that we are not conscious of, but that are very much here with us. So the non-physical intelligences, if you will. 

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Elizabeth: So in shamanic circles or parlance, they talk a lot about nature being visible spirit, and spirit being invisible nature, so that the ‘physical’ natural world is not really any different than the spiritual world. It’s all very much intertwined. It’s just what we can see with ordinary consciousness is limited. 

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JD: I just remembered what it was I was going to mention, and it actually ties in very closely to what Elizabeth just said, which is that even the example that you gave about the senses speaks to the same aspect of the unity duality and so forth.

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Because the split between these is an active one at some level – usually not conscious, but of a decision, right? Even if you go back to the basic creation myths, there was one that eventually became two for some purpose, and so forth. And you had mentioned the senses, and I think in many ways that’s the same kind of thing that’s happening where we talk about five senses, but even those senses aren’t entirely separated, right? Taste and smell, they’re not completely different senses. They work together. 

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And then there are other things that we get information from in certain ways that don’t fall naturally into those senses – remote perception kinds of things. Well that doesn’t fall into any of these. And even emotional responses to things doesn’t quite necessarily fall into or react into one of those classical five senses. But we, we learn to organise in those five senses. And eventually we kind of tell ourselves in many cases that those are the five senses. That if it hasn’t come to you through those five senses, it has to be you imagining creating, hallucinating, whatever. And so we tend to dismiss those. 

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And I think what you were getting at at the beginning about the fact that we lose a certain level of connection is because we train ourselves to ignore aspects that don’t fall into how we’ve been trained to organise things. But if we allow ourselves then to step back from that and say, yeah, maybe there are other ways of sensing things, maybe there are aspects of myself that can’t be explained solely in terms of a dual way of looking at the universe and so forth. So I think there was a lot of really cool stuff in what she said there, which I guess is where I was going with all that. 

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Elizabeth, you had had your hand up before. Did you have a separate topic that you were going to raise? 

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Elizabeth: No, but I studied Qigong for a while. I’m trying to get back into it. And one of the things that I loved about Qigong is that after a while you can actually sense your own bioenergy. And it’s not that subtle – not subtle energies, you know what I mean? After a while it can be quite pronounced, in fact. And that was a real revelation to me. 

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So that’s why in the chat I’ve spoken a lot about how there may be a lot of ways to experience a more direct perception of things that are ‘non-ordinary’, and one way may be doing these kinds of scientific experiments.I absolutely believe in the scientific method. I absolutely believe in the power of observation, both of the external world and the internal world. And I do think that there are ways that even ordinary persons such as myself can cultivate at least a little understanding, like a real perception of these other dimensions. That’s all. But it doesn’t have to be about faith – I guess what I’m saying.

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JD: It can be about direct perception, and I think that’s one of the exciting things about what’s happened over the last 40–50 years with using specific techniques like random event generators or whatever the tools are where it allows us to have a – I don’t want to say crutch, as that isn’t quite the right word – but a support by which we can look at something and go, wait, wait, wait. I have reason, my logical brain can accept that these things I’m otherwise being told, well I have to ignore this beyond-traditional kind of sensation. 

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But now we’ve got devices that are showing that there’s an effect here, and it eases the burden on us to stop thinking of it purely as faith, and recognise it more as an experience that we can work off of. Which is, I think, really exciting, to have those tools to help us untrain ourselves from the bad habits that maybe we’ve gotten into from growing up in that kind of environment that our society tends to promote.

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Are there other questions, other thoughts that folks have? Doesn’t have to be a question – it can be anything that you want to share. 

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Elizabeth: I have a purely conceptual question, going back to the Shiva Shakti metaphor. So, I always understood – and I am not a scholar of Vedic texts, so I could be wrong – but I always understood Shiva as the destroyer, and Shakti as representing the creative force of the universe.

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So to me, when I thought about that, I aligned Shakti with syntropy in this discussion and Shiva with entropy. But then when I went on my phone to look things up, I saw somewhere someone did the exact opposite. And I wondered if Jeff or Ulisse had any thoughts about that. 

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UD: Well, I had the idea that Shiva was the creator and Shakti was the destroyer. But anyhow, I think it doesn’t really matter which one it is, but we find these in all the processes of life. For example, if you get metabolism, we have catabolic processes and anabolic processes that destroy and others that contract, they build. So there is always this game of destruction and building, and this is at the basis of evolution. If there would not be this game between entropy and syntropy, there would be no evolution. 

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But this also tells us another thing is that because of this game between entropy and syntropy, between Shiva Shakti and so on, there is always an exchange of energy and matter with the environment. So a vital key point for life is to be able to exchange matter, energy and information with the environment.

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JD: Thank you. I too, am not a scholar in this respect, so I couldn’t really speak to what anybody intended for those kinds of ideas. I can just say from my own personal way of looking at the universe that the ideas of finding distinction and finding commonality are sort of foundational principles in how we organise everything in our lives, and whether or not you look at those as he destruction of something versus the creation of those can be from a particular perspective. Is it better to divide or better to join? 

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Well, it kind of depends on what it is that you’re doing. So it maybe isn’t as surprising to me that there isn’t quite as clear a mapping between Shiva and Shakti to syntropy and entropy. But in truth, like I said, I probably am not doing justice to the true Vedic interpretations because I don’t have that background. 

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UD: What is interesting is that Shiva and Shakti are a unity. You cannot separate them. They’re constantly dancing and playing together. And the same is with entropy and syntropy. You cannot separate entropy from syntropy. They’re constantly playing together, transforming the universe. 

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JD: Yeah. And that is one of the most driving factors in The Nexus is the whole point of this being that it’s so typical to see people thinking about one or whatever it is, one of either syntropy or entropy being better in some way.

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Well, if only we just had more of that and so – but it’s not really, because ultimately they have to dance together and they have to dance together in a way that they’re not homogenising into a single thing, but that they’re maintaining their own character, their own nature, and learning to work together.

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And in music, it’s like, “Well, we don’t want all the instruments playing the same thing. Eventually we want them to do their own thing. But we just want them to work in harmony. So.

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Zach: Jeff, if you think there’s time for one more comment or thought here, I wanted to bring up something that I’ve commented on at different times, and it’s been a theme for me recently thinking about this proposed idea of a time crystal.

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Many people probably aren’t aware of it, but that's part of the reason why I’m bringing it up. I think it presents an interesting model for – not just a kind of linear time, a past, a future, but instead a kind of branching of causalities and a linking of them in a geometrical fashion. And I think that it could be an interesting way to start to get past some of these notions of is something in the future, is something in the past, and where do I sit in relation to that? Am I affecting something that did happen? Et cetera, et cetera – all of these words that are about past and future. 

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And instead, the model with a ‘crystal’, the reason why it’s called a crystal is because there’s this kind of faceted branching structure, like in like how we see different kinds of crystals, and the point is to trace the connections, those edges – the facets of the crystal and the way that they connect – because when they connect, as in a time crystal, are a kind of causality and different amounts of probability between branching on one facet versus another facet, et cetera.

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I don’t really have something I’m trying to pitch or even ask here to people other than I’m trying to bring it up because I think all of us who think about these kinds of things might be better armed by having more models, and time crystals have come out of classical mainstream quantum mechanic studies looking at the way in which probabilities can branch, and ultimately the kind of connections between things that can happen in a quantum system of some particular character. And that particular character is, again, the particular character of the time crystal as well. I’m happy to talk about it, if it’s an interesting conversational topic right now, but otherwise I just wanted to put it in people’s heads, because I think it’s a good thing to look into for the topics that we cover. 

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