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In memory of Ralph Abraham, mathemagician extraordinaire
Oct. 08, 2024. 7 mins. read.
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Ralph Abraham was a pioneer of chaos theory and consciousness studies, and an enlightened spiritual teacher.
A few days ago, browsing my X feed, I found out that my friend Ralph Abraham had passed away.
This post from a Robert Anton Wilson fan site collects some X posts about Ralph’s departure.
An Instagram post by Ross School, a school that Abraham co-architected, honors his memory with this biographical sketch:
“Abraham served as a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz for many years, focusing his work on applied and computational mathematics, with an emphasis on the theories of dynamical systems, chaos, and bifurcations. He was a prolific author and consultant on the application of chaos theory across numerous fields from ecology to psychotherapy. Abraham maintained an interdisciplinary perspective and deep belief that systems theory could bridge the gap between science and the humanities…”
More about Ralph
Lookout Santa Cruz has a good story dedicated to the memory of Ralph, “a seminal figure in the 1960s counterculture.”
Ralph was a frequent contributor to the legendary Mondo 2000 magazine that covered and popularized cyberculture in the 1980s and 1990s, a pioneer of consciousness studies, and an enlightened spiritual teacher. Ralph co-authored the cult books “Trialogues on the Edge of the West” (1992) and “The Evolutionary Mind” (1997) with Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake.
I haven’t seen yet any obituaries from UC Santa Cruz or from UC Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton. I’m sure those obituaries will appear in the next few days or weeks. But this makes me sad, because Ralph was a giant. I think more people should know about him. This post is my modest contribution and my tribute to Ralph.
I first met Ralph in person on September 29 (my birthday!), 2018, in Santa Cruz.
Before meeting Ralph, I had been corresponding with him for some time. We started exchanging emails and video-chatting when I stumbled upon a book that Ralph had written with Indian physicist Sisir Roy, titled Demystifying the Akasha: Consciousness and the Quantum Vacuum (2010). We discussed the book at length.
The book covers a huge territory including Western and Eastern philosophies and religions, the foundations of quantum physics, recent advances in quantum gravity research, and the digital physics of discrete spacetimes. A version of the book is available online as a free download. The following short description is excerpted and adapted from my book Tales of the Turing Church (2020).
Akashic physics
The Akasha is a Sanskrit word for ether or space. We can think of the Akashic field as a cosmic memory field that stores permanent records of everything that ever happens in the universe.
The proposed mathematical model for the Akashic field is a dynamical cellular network dubbed QX. This is a graph with a huge number of nodes and internal dynamics similar to cellular automata. QX exists beyond space and time, and generates them.
Stephen Wolfram had similar ideas, which he is now developing in the Wolfram Physics Project on the foundations of digital physics.
The graph “contains all times” and fluctuates in an internal time-like dimension, not to be confused with ordinary time. Space, time, matter, energy, and consciousness emerge from the dynamical cellular network through a process of condensation:
“Thus, spacetime is squeezed from the dynamical cellular network, QX, as toothpaste from a tube… The microscopic system, QX, sparkles with activity on the scale of Planck space and time, while macroscopic spacetime unrolls essentially continuously. The past and present become known, while the future remains yet a mystery… the mind/body connections are completed in a circuit outside ordinary consensual reality in a submicroscopic atomic realm beyond our senses, but revealed by the progress of modern physics… This provides a background for psi phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance, but also leaves a window of opportunity for free will.”
The Indian connection
In “Demystifying the Akasha,” Ralph also told the story of his long involvement with India and its spiritual tradition.
In 2016 I was trying to organize a conference at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture (RMIC) in Kolkata, India, a place dear to Ralph’s heart, so I invited Ralph to join other speakers including Ben Goertzel and Frank Tipler in Kolkata. When we ran into funding problems bringing all speakers to Kolkata, we pivoted to an online conference. Ralph contributed a video talk titled The Quantum Akasha and a paper titled Theosophy and the Arts, and participated in a video discussion with me and Sisir Roy.
Eventually the RMIC conference took place in a very reduced format: I gave a talk on Physics and the Indian Spiritual Tradition at RMIC in 2018. In this video I tried to capture the spiritual vibrations at the RMIC campus, which captivated Ralph.
We need another miracle
In 2017 I wrote a post about Ralph titled Mathemagician Ralph Abraham: We Need Another Miracle for the revived online edition of Mondo 2000, reporting a snippet of conversation with Ralph:
“By 1990 I had essentially given up on the fate of the biosphere and noosphere. We had all done our best, nothing seemed to work. Then, in 1994, I became aware of the innovation of the World Wide Web. This seemed to give us new hope, as the connectivity of the noosphere was getting this major bump. I poured all my creative energy into cyberspace. My optimism lasted a decade or so, until it seemed the forces of evil were once again pulling ahead. Now it seems we need another miracle.”
Cyberspace is what we called the online world in the miraculous decade of the 1990s. But now, in the 2020s, we are living through another miraculous decade. Cyberspace started as a decentralized frontierland, then it was re-centralized by the forces of evil. But now we are decentralizing it again, hopefully for good. We are going back to the Moon, hopefully for good, and then onward to Mars and the rest of the solar system. And the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to be the biggest miracle of them all.
In one of his last writings, titled Consciousness and AI (2023) Ralph briefly reviewed the history of AI and the latest development up to GPT-4, and established parallels with his Akashic physics. He concluded that AI and the prospect of machine consciousness “are currently being discussed with some urgency on the frontiers of science and philosophy, as the underlying science and engineering are evolving at terrifying speed.”
Ralph was a great scientist and a visionary thinker. But even more importantly, he was a kind, warm-hearted person, and I’m honored that he called me a friend. Good bye Ralph, rest in peace in the cosmic memory field.
Mindplex editor-in-chief Ben Goertzel adds –
I knew Ralph slightly on a social level, though I was close to his younger brother Fred with whom I was intensively involved in the early days of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology in the early 1990s.
Fred introduced me to Ralph’s books and papers which were highly influential on me early in my career – both by highlighting how nonlinear dynamics was applicable to highly complex living systems like human minds and bodies (which is well known now but was still cutting-edge in the early 90s, and of course even more so in the early 70s when Ralph got started with it!), and by exploring the connections between Eastern philosophy and Western science with a dynamical-systems flavor.
The theme of self-organizing pattern emergence in dynamical networks that one sees in Ralph’s work plays a major role in my current work on AGI systems like OpenCog Hyperon, even though the specific mathematics of these systems is quite different from the precise systems Ralph studied.
What an amazing, creative, always-way-ahead-of-his time mind Ralph Abraham was! It is a shame to lose him from this dimension, but one of the lessons one takes from his work is that he will still be with us in some sense, resonating nonlinearly in the Akashic field, which his fascinating math helps describe!
Ben Goertzel
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5 Comments
5 thoughts on “In memory of Ralph Abraham, mathemagician extraordinaire”
Thank you, guys! I had no idea who Ralph Abraham was. He seems like an interesting figure, and I’ll definitely check out his books.
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Ralph's books will blow your mind. Start with the trialogues. If you are into maths and physics, check "Foundations of Mechanics." If you want to understand the mathematics of chaos visually without formulas, check "Dynamics: The Geometry Of Behavior."
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Super thanks, I will start with "Dynamics: The Geometry Of Behavior".
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Check out the SHeldrake-Abraham-McKenna trialogues if you haven't already: https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/the-sheldrake-mckenna-abraham-trialogues
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I have the books (I prefer reading to listening), but I'll listen to hear Ralph's voice again. I'm now listening to the Latest Conversation Between Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham.
Of the three, Sheldrake is the only one who is still with us. I can't wait to see his very politically incorrect views validated by new theoretical studies and/or experiments.
Thank you for adding Ben's comments, insightful and inspiring as usual!
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