Toward a Unified View of Solar System Dynamics, the Orchestrated Objective Reduction Theory of Consciousness, and Social Mood

A Note from Kurtis Todd

Why This Paper Is Here

David Smolker approaches these questions the way a rigorous lawyer approaches a complex case — following the evidence wherever it leads, assembling the best available expert testimony across every relevant field, and reasoning carefully from what the record shows to what it implies. What distinguishes his work is not credentials in any single discipline. It is the refusal to stay in one lane when the evidence requires crossing all of them.

This paper is better than a great deal of the peer-reviewed literature I have read on these subjects. It is better organized. It is more rigorously sourced — over one hundred and thirty citations, assembled with the precision of someone who has actually read the underlying work, not merely quoted it secondhand. It is more honest about the limits of what it claims. And it is more ambitious in the right way — not by overstating the conclusions, but by following the logic across disciplinary boundaries that specialists are professionally discouraged from crossing.

Smolker builds a nested chain of argument that runs from Planck-scale quantum gravity through microtubule biophysics through primary cilia neurophysiology through serotonin synthesis through mood regulation through collective human socioeconomic behavior through a century of market cycle data — and back again. Each link is documented. Each transition is justified. The chain holds. A trained specialist in any one of these fields would find his treatment of their domain careful and well-sourced. The synthesis across all of them is his. No specialist would have been positioned to make it. That is what an independent mind with rigorous reasoning and sufficient determination can do that credentialed specialists often cannot — see the whole when everyone else is required to study the parts.

He did not read the Infinitely Simple framework before writing this. The convergence is independent. He arrived — through gravitational physics, the Penrose-Hameroff Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory, fractal time crystal behavior, primary cilia as gravitational antennas, and the statistical relationship between the Sun's orbital angular momentum and a century of market data — at conclusions that map with striking precision onto conclusions the framework reaches through pure logical reasoning from first principles. The description is not similar. It is in many places identical. That is not because one borrowed from the other. It is because the reality is the same and honest inquiry, followed far enough from any direction, arrives at the same place.

I am publishing this paper here with David's permission and under his name because it deserves to be read. Nobody paid him to reach these conclusions. Nobody pointed him toward the framework. He got there on his own. That is exactly the kind of evidence worth taking seriously.

— Kurtis Todd, Author · Infinitely Simple: The Foundation

The Convergence

Where the paper and the framework arrive at the same place

The Paper

Toward a Unified View of Solar System Dynamics, the Orchestrated Objective Reduction Theory of Consciousness, and Social Mood

By David Smolker

Introduction

Consciousness remains one of the great unsolved scientific mysteries. Neuroscientists have considerable difficulty explaining how consciousness arises in the brain or even what conscious experience is in a physical sense. The philosopher David Chalmers refers to this as the "Hard Problem" raised by the subjective, thus far unmeasurable, aspects of conscious experience known as "qualia." Consciousness appears inextricably intertwined with mood — feelings of optimism and pessimism — which in turn drives collective human socio-economic behavior in rhythmic, fractal fashion. The economist John Maynard Keynes contends that this behavior is driven by "animal spirits," a term derived from the Latin spiritus animalis meaning "the breath that awakens the mind." However, conventional psychological, neuroscientific, sociological, and economic theories fail to explain in physical terms both consciousness and the rhythmic fractal character of human socio-economic behavior driven by these "animal spirits."

Where might we turn for answers? The theoretical physicist David Bohm challenges what he views as the fragmented, mechanistic world view of modern science. Instead, he proposes a world view focused on the "holomovement" or flow of matter and energy that "include[s] everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border." Likening this flow to the stream of consciousness, he argues that matter and consciousness are different aspects of one overall order and that our notions of the nature of reality, including cosmology, require a consistent account of consciousness and vice versa. It is in this spirit that the author attempts to explain these mysterious phenomena in terms of what Bohm refers to as "relatively autonomous sub-totalities" of the holomovement to arrive at an integrated, unified view of solar system dynamics, the biophysics of consciousness, and social mood.

Chalmers conjectures that the key link between physical processes and consciousness is information generated by causal interactions. The question becomes what that information might be, and what are the causal interactions that generate it. Bohm and Hiley shed light on this question by introducing the concept of "active" information as a fundamental aspect of reality: "a form having very little energy enters into and directs a much greater energy whose form is similar to that of the smaller energy." What might such "active" energy be?

Penrose-Hameroff Orchestrated Objective Reduction Theory of Consciousness

According to Orch OR, Objective Reduction (OR) is directly tied to fundamental Planck-scale space-time geometry, and involves the random physical evolution of incredibly small, separate, coherent super-positioned Planck-scale space-time manifolds that reach a critical gravitational threshold before collapsing to a single space-time configuration. Each random quantum reduction is viewed as an instant of proto-conscious awareness — vast numbers of which are orchestrated by the brain in quantum mechanical fashion generating classical neural vibratory beat frequencies. The beat frequencies are said to result from oscillating pi-electron resonance clouds within the hydrophobic pockets of the tubulin protein dimers that comprise the microtubules forming the interconnected cytoskeletal lattice structure of the neuronal networks of the brain. Under Orch OR, the microtubular lattice networks effectively act as biological vibro-electronic conductors enabling cytoskeletal tubulin dipole oscillations to spread throughout the brain resonantly in a unified, global, fractal, scale-invariant, harmonic, quantum coherent fashion — giving rise to generally accepted neural correlates of conscious awareness (e.g., 40 Hz EEG), and to what we perceive as the stream of conscious awareness.

Due to the difficulty in experimentally accessing the Planck scale, the theory is extremely hard to directly test. The question becomes whether there is circumstantial evidence supporting the theory and where might we look for it?

The Conscious State of Mood

Mood is a subjective, temporary but dragged-out conscious emotional state of mind reflecting relative degrees of happiness and well-being. Mood drives motivation, physiological states, and behavior. It determines people's sentiment, both positive and negative, and influences their appetite for risk taking. Mood is observable, measurable, and collectively exhibits periodic behavior cycling in waves from extremes of optimism to pessimism and back again. These waves appear fractal and scale-invariant in character both spatially and temporally, and reflect patterned, mood-driven collective human psychological herding behavior.

As observed by Elliott Wave theorist Robert Prechter, "fractally fluctuating social mood is an expression of fundamental nature." Penrose suggests that quantum gravitational collapse (OR) is an instant of subjective conscious awareness or qualia rooted in fundamental, fine-scale spacetime geometry. On this basis, Stuart Hameroff further suggests that life originated and has evolved for billions of years to optimize positive pleasurable OR-mediated qualia while avoiding negative ones. In other words, mood may well be a fundamental attribute of the Universe.

The Stock Market As a Proxy for the Conscious State of Mood

If the neural dynamics of the brain are entrained with the gravitational dynamics of the Solar System, and are poised at the edge of criticality, sensitive to slight but significant changes in these gravitational dynamics, might such changes correspond to significant shifts in social mood — and might these shifts be reflected in the stock market, which is a good proxy for social mood?

To test possible correlation between tidal gravitational forcings and mood, the monthly Standard and Poor's 500 stock index since 1800 is overlaid on the monthly rate of change of the Sun's orbital angular momentum as it orbits the center of mass of the Solar System (CMSS). Major peaks and valleys of the two series are often coincident. Statistical analysis reveals that the two series are weakly but significantly correlated (r = −.19, p < .00001). When the data is detrended and a 12-month moving average applied, the correlations between turning points in the data series become more apparent.

Possible Mechanisms

Given studies that strongly suggest correlation between mood-driven socioeconomic behavior and Solar System dynamics, and given that Orch OR's foundation is gravity, might Orch OR help explain the apparent link between Solar System dynamics and the conscious state of mood? The author suggests it does.

Gravity is ubiquitous, universal, inescapable, and cannot be cancelled or shielded. It is the engine that organizes the Universe, including our Solar System. It governs at the classical level by Newton's Law of Gravitation — a power law that appears scale-invariant and fractal in character and effect. In nature, power laws govern a wide variety of complex systems, including the brain and financial markets, generating a state of self-organized criticality where the system exhibits scale-free self-similarity, is perpetually out of balance, but is still organized in a poised critical state such that minor disturbances can cause major ones.

OR, Orch OR, and specific conscious states resulting from Orch OR, such as mood, are in theory components of an entrained, non-linear, scale-free, chaotic, far-from-equilibrium system potentially sensitive to very slight changes in the gravitational variables that underlie OR. According to Penrose, at the Planck scale, the quantum effects of gravity are expected to be strong and to effect deviations from the standard linear Schrödinger quantum unitary evolution such that "tiny differences in space-time structure can have large effects for they entail subtle but fundamental influences on the very rules of quantum mechanics."

Slight changes in this dynamic could be detected and transduced by primary cilia and manifest as phase changes in the oscillating vibrational and synchronous modes of the microtubules in the primary cilia axoneme. Through a combination of retrograde and anterograde intracellular flagellar transport along the axoneme, these vibratory mode changes could induce changes in the rate of hydroxylation of tryptophan into serotonin, and its transport to serotonergic mood centers of the brain. There is direct evidence that mood changes in humans are in fact synchronized with slight gravitational changes — T.A. Wehr studied patients with rapid-cycling bipolar disorder and found synchronies between the patients' mood cycles and three lunar cycles that modulate the amplitude of the moon's semi-diurnal gravimetric tides.

Conclusion

Empirical proof of Orch OR remains elusive due to the difficulty in experimentally accessing the Planck scale. However, correlations between the observable cyclical effects of gravity on biological behavior, including that of humans, the structure and function of the human brain, the neurophysical mechanisms that regulate mood and its associated behaviors, and observable, generally accepted proxies for social mood suggest that mood is influenced in a non-trivial manner by the cyclical gravitational dynamics of the Solar System.

Because Orch OR is fundamentally a gravitational phenomenon, this influence provides circumstantial evidence supporting the scientific validity of Orch OR while providing a possible physical explanation for why human socio-economic behavior cycles.

The author suggests that correlations between the observable cyclical biological effects of gravity, the neurophysical mechanisms that regulate mood and its associated behaviors, and observable, generally accepted proxies for social mood suggest three things. First, the conscious state of mood — and thus consciousness itself — is influenced in a non-trivial manner by the cyclical gravitational dynamics of the Solar System, primarily those of the Earth-Moon-Sun system and the planets having the greatest tidal gravitational influence on Earth. Second, this influence provides indirect support for the scientific validity of Orch OR, which is theorized to be fundamentally a gravitational phenomenon. And third, Orch OR may solve two mysteries by providing physical explanations of both consciousness and the cyclic fractal fluctuations of social mood that drive human socio-economic behavior.

The Framework This Converges With

Read the argument that arrives at the same place from first principles

Infinitely Simple: The Foundation derives the nature of reality through pure logical reasoning — no assumptions, no tradition, no faith required. Smolker arrives through gravitational physics and market cycle analysis. The conclusions align because the reality is the same.