This is a chapter of a paper which is proposed as a model for theory of everything. For examining the principles, readers are either referred to look at the singularity as seperate entitiy in this library or to browse the whole paper at www.universaltheory.org.

Mind

This theory observes astrophysics, quantum mechanics and mind principles to offer an alternative model for TOE. This is a work in progress. Your input is very needed to indentify the flaws and improving the principles.

The term mind has such a battered history that it can hardly be used clearly in technical writing yet it is almost unavoidable.

Mind - As a Separate Entity

By using the word Mind I intend to relate the cognition of organism about itself and its environment. Consciousness on the other hand is a more sophisticated process, which higher organisms with more complex nervous systems are exhibiting in their interaction with environment. But for the sake of simplicity I will use the two words interchangeably. In this paper I adopt the Plato's interpretation for mind, which assumes mind as separate entity from body. Rene Descartes and his followers further developed this view later. Aristotle and later Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the other hand, rejected the duality. During the past centuries Aristotle belief that mind is a product of brain function, has been more popular among scientific community. Mainly, because Aristotle's version was more practical and yield itself to experimental investigations. But it seems that new findings and new theories are looking to other possibilities. Santiago Theory of Cognition sees the consciousness as a process and body as the structure. Let's try to see if Plato's version can help us to understand some of the paradoxes, which are facing us. Francisco Di Biase and Mário Sérgio F. Rocha from International Holistic University, Brasília believe "Consciousness" conception as something essential, primary and irreducible is also found in the consciousness maps, obtained from thousands of psychotherapeutics reports and consistent and converging experiences, observed by several researchers of the medical and psychological areas (Jung, 1959; Grof, 1985; Moody Jr., 1976; Ring, 1980; Sabom, 1982; Kubler-Ross, 1983; Weiss, 1996).

These researches works with persons submitted to altered states of consciousness, through various methods, like hypnosis, relaxation, meditation, holotropic breathing, near-to-death experiences, etc. Surprisingly, maps reveals "an ontology and a cosmology in which consciousness cannot originate from, or be explained in terms of any other thing. It is a primordial factor of existence and from it emerges everything that exists" (Grof, in Capra, 1988). ⁽²⁰⁾

As an analogy for mind to be a separate entity, please note that motion is not the product of legs, rather motion exists as a separate entity and any being who owns moving organs, can adopt it.

For the proposed singularity, we are trying to imagine a being with no mass and no spatial dimension, which is also not time bounded and at the same time, is main source of information and is a an enormous source of energy.

The concept is very unfamiliar and confusing. Or is it?

We have an entity inside each of us, which possess the above characteristics. We call it consciousness or mind.

Sir John Eccles, the noble prizewinner for his work on synaptic mechanism, believes a world exists separate from the matter that contains all subjective and mental experiences.Let us explore this further.

Space

While we are sitting in our chair reading these lines, perhaps our mind is elsewhere, in the kitchen and probably thinking about the coffee maker. Perhaps our mind is with our loved one, which is at work or at school, at a distance. If you are fascinated with astronomy, your mind can be two billion light years away at this time. Where is our mind? Can you show me a location for it? Can you give me a size for it? Is there an actual distance that our mind has to travel to reach to a remote area? May I suggest that mind is present and at the same time does not possess any spatial locality? As far as I know there is no specific location in central nervous system, which is mapped as being center of consciousness. Later on we can see how holonomic brain theory suggests that information in the brain is stored as frequency rather than localized bio-physiological changes in neurons.

Mind does not possess locality

Ein Ajabtar ke mano tou be yeki konj inja

Ham, dar in dam be Araghimo Khorasan mano tou

It is most surprising that we are at this corner

At the same time we are in Iraq (west) and Khorasan (east )

Rumi

One can argue that when we are thinking about remote places, our mind is not actually in those places. But uses bits and pieces of memories and information to create virtual locations. Nevertheless, the fact that our mind can be present in different locations in its own domain set the example for a non-local entity. Chris Clarke says "Mind is inherently non-local. On the other hand, the world is governed by a quantum physics that is inherently non-local. This is no accident, but a precise correspondence. Mind and quantum operator algebras are the enjoyed and contemplated aspects of the same thing." 9 summary

Time

How about time? Our mind can travel to yesterday, predict events for next week, go back to ancient times, and even travel to the time of the big bang. Our mind does not have to wait for the passage of time to finish its journey to remote distances or to time travel. It seems our mind exist in any time or no time. I mean mind is not time bonded.

May I suggest that the rules of time, as we know it in our space-time universe, are not applicable to our mind? For example, unlike real time, which has only one direction, along the history of observer, our mind can time travel back and forth. Later on we will see how imaginary time direction in quantum theory mimics the time in our mind because it can travel in both directions.

Matter

Matter does not exist in our awareness but its image does.

Let's make an imaginary world using the above tools. Just like what we do when we daydream or dream in sleep.Suppose you heard on TV that this week's Lottery grand prize is twenty million dollars. You are sitting in your armchair, having your coffee and thinking what you would do if you win the grand prize. Of course at first you would think of paying off your mortgage or car loan and other debts. But then you would start thinking about more exotic things that you could do with that money, like buying a coup Mercedes, or a mansion with a 50 feet long pool, a tennis court, at least 6 bed rooms... It also should have a very large master bedroom with on-suite bathroom containing whirl-pool, sauna, steam room and any other facility that you may think of. Suppose you are not married yet, you would dream about marrying your ideal spouse and you picture yourself having a very happy life with children in the mansion. Yet, all of the sudden the alarm clock rings. You have to stop dreaming.

Where is that world that you created? Can you pick up a yardstick and actually measure the size of that pool or the land or master bedroom. Show me those children that you where playing with in the backyard. Which was or is or will be the date of your wedding. Where is the location of your dream? Doesn't your dream mimic the singularity in the sense that it can contain a big world whereas itself does not have any dimension or it is not bond to time? Which one is primary, the dream or the actual mansion? Isn't it true that dream is the origin of our creativity? May be you will stop and buy a lottery ticket in your way to work?

While images of matter are all over our minds, as I mentioned before, no tangible matter could be found in the whole process.

Memory

Memory also can contain a big material world, while itself is not time bounded or have any spatial dimension. We also are not aware of actual matter involved in our mind or memory. Holonomic brain theory suggests that our memory is restored as spectral frequency not as spatial data (19). It also suggests that Consciousness has a spectral nature. No specific location in central nervous system can be defined as house for mind. Memory also exhibits the interesting self-organizing system feature.

Please note that here we are not talking about time elapsed to recall a memory which is a function of neuronal activity and the speed of action potential traveling along nerve fibers. We are talking about mind domain not the anatomy and physiology of nervous system.

Energy

Now you are sitting here and bored with all of this reading. You feel that you crave for a cup of coffee. You drop this article and rush to your coffee maker to make a fresh coffee. What happened? What moved you?

For those who practice it, meditation is an energy booster. Our mind is our source of energy and motivation.

Information

Mind is the information center of our body. Information is received, restored, processed and analyzed regularly. According to Karl Jung our awareness also contains more subtle information in a place where he calls it collective unconsciousness. According to him, our mind has information restored from generations before and through the history of mankind. He also includes information from our ancestor mammals all the way to first protozoa's and beyond as part of information which is stored in our mind.

While I could go on and explore other characteristics of consciousness, I will stop at this point and just mention that, it seems that our mind is not following the laws of our space-time universe. Rather it mimics the proposed singularity and follows singularity's characteristics. At the same time, by concentrating on the mind behavior, we can feel the sense of familiarity and acquaintance with singularity. Later on we can explore how mind also follows some of the very strange quantum mechanical behavior. For example, superposition of states is our common experience with mind activity. in our mind we can accommodate simultaneously the different possible outcome of shooting towards Schrodinger's cat. that is how we think,evaluate and plan accordingly.

Critics of the above view reason that in macroworld decoherence (sum of multiple incidents which cancel out each other) dissolves the superposition of states to one state. So we can not observe this quantum mechanical phenomena in brain function which is composed of enormous quantum particles . The simple answer is we do have it anyway. We are talking about similarities between quantum arena and mind domain. this resemblance should have its at a layer deeper than neurons or microtubules or any other material structure of brain. We are claiming that Mind ,Quantum world and astrophysics are interconnected and together they reveal the reality in a deeper level.

It is astonishing that the above three apparently different topics (mind,astrophysics,quantum mechanics) are interlocking with each other like different pieces of one puzzle.

Dr. Evan walker rightfully claims " ... I do know that the philosophy of science that ignored the question of consciousness is standing there dead." 8 p331

Is it also an irony that our creation power initiate in our mind and creation of the universe initiates at singularity?

Roger Sperry has written voluminously on his personal concept of mind and consciousness. In his view mind is one of a whole class of superior properties that emerge from material systems when they achieve a certain high level of organization. 10 p139

We can get a very detailed map of the brain. We will explore and find the neurobiological and biochemistry of different functions of the brain. We can explore how our mind works. But none of them will prove that mind is a product of nervous system.

One may ask, how come an animal with more complex nervous system can manifest a more advanced mind than a simple organism? Shouldn't they show the same complex mind? Here I have to choose motion as analogy again. With better moving organs the organisms can move better and faster. Same relation can be used for mind and brain complexity.

On the above analogy the motion performance of a species with more developed neuro-musculature will be superior. With the same token the mind performance of a more complex brain will be superior to less developed brain. Still in doubt? I would like to refer you to a very interesting book, Quantum Mind, by Arnold Mindell a psychologist and physicist. Using scientific methodology, he compared Mind with Quantum behavior, Mathematic fields and Astrophysics theories. He showed how closely they intermingle and mimic each other to create a whole system. The closed system, which we are looking for. Dr. Mindell demonstrates that mathematics of quantum physics reveals the pattern behind psychological and spiritual methods of unfolding dream time.

Francisco Di Biase and Mário Sérgio F. Rocha from International Holistic University, Brasília, the authors of INFORMATION, SELF-ORGANIZATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS towards a holo-informational theory of consciousness state, "Our universe structured as a quantum holo-informational non-local field full of quantum potential with meaning, is an intelligent (informed) universe functioning like a mind, as Sir James Jeans already had observed." ⁽²⁰⁾

This holographic organization is what Bohm calls implicate order, a model that includes, space and time in its structure as an enfolded dimension. Functioning in this holograph mode, our brain can "mathematically builds the objective reality" interpreting frequencies originally from another dimension, from a fundamental order, a holo-informational field located beyond time and space. ⁽²⁰⁾

Our mind is a subsystem of a universal hologram, accessing and interpreting this holographic universe. We are; interactive resonant and harmonic systems with this unbroken self-organizing wholeness. We are this holo-informational field of consciousness, and not observers external to it. The external observer's perspective made us loose the sense and the feeling of unity or supreme identity; generating the immense difficulties we have in understanding that we are one with the whole and not part of it. (20)

Carl Jung's collective unconsciousness also assigns a borderless entity to mind. Jung mentioned that in deeper level of consciousness, we are aware of our past generation's endeavors during human history. He believed in general sense there is a common awareness in between living things. His idea later developed to Transpersonal Psychology By Abraham Maslow, Roger Welsh, Stanislav Grof and others. Transpersonal psychology is extension of humanistic psychology and studies expansion of consciousness beyond the usual ego boundaries to contain other living things and does not embrace the limitation of time and space. The educator Robert Hutchins, Ph.D, points out that transpersonal psychology is the future norm in psychology. He believes our personality is the crust or skin covering our transpersonal essence. He further remarks, transpersonal psychology emerges out of personal psychology, as a result of the individual growth and maturation. He also believes that transpersonal psychology asserts that religious and mystical experiences and the perspective that derive from them are valid approaches to reality and can be studies scientifically.

Harald Walach a psychologist from University Hospital Freiburg, Germany, extends the prediction of Weak Quantum Theory that entanglement should ensue between parts of a system, to group of his patients. In his experiment he shows the improvement of the patients who received placebo treatment compared to patients who actually received the pharmacological treatment was quiet high (r=.78). He postulates that this is because entanglement. He reports many other clinical experiments of himself and other researchers which suggests generalized entanglement. He postulates "By that mechanism quite a few other hitherto unexplained phenomena , which are deemed unscientific,could be explained. among them would be relational phenomena as the basis for healing, ritual and other branches of complementary and alternative medicine, or parapsychological phenomena. Consciousness, possibly being itself a variable complimentary to matter, would enter the field by ways yet to be explored and would take a new role." ⁽⁴⁴⁾

Transpersonal psychology defies the notion that mind is the product of individuals brain function and look at it as a more universal and extended entity.

Dr. Karl Pribram, professor of neuropsychology at Stanford University states "We got the brain data first, and then we see, look, it fits the same mathematics as quantum mechanics.....the problems that have been faced in quantum mechanics for the whole century -- well, since the twenties -- and those paradoxes also apply at the psychophysical level and at the neuronal level, and therefore we have to face the same sets of problems. At the same time, I think what David Bohm is doing, is showing that some of the classical conceptions which were thought not to apply at the quantum level, really do apply at the quantum level ...... if indeed we're right that these quantum-like phenomena, or the rules of quantum mechanics, apply all the way through to our psychological processes, to what's going on in the nervous system -- then we have an explanation perhaps, certainly we have a parallel, to the kind of experiences that people have called spiritual experiences. Because the descriptions you get with spiritual experiences seem to parallel the descriptions of quantum physics." ⁽⁴⁵⁾

The list of documents about the overlap of quantum mechanics and mind is numerous and accessible in internet or elsewhere for people who are interested in the subject. suffice to say that it seems that mind is originating from sub-atomic and planck scale rather than molecular and cellular levels. Dr. Pribram like many other researchers testify for close similarities between mind function and quantum mechanical behavior.

Mind, Mathematics and Physical World

Roger Penrose in his very interesting book, The Large, the Small and Human Mind, questions the idea that the mind is a product of physical world. Rather he suggests that the mind and physical world influence each other. He also mentions "Mathematics is product of human mind." (Reference 5-p 96)

The creation of that part of mathematics, which deals with actual physical entities, can be materialistically explained. Human race facing the material objects created mathematics to facilitate his interaction with the surroundings. But if our mind developed a mathematics, which goes beyond objective physical world, and if a part of that math can foresee and guide us to unknown territories, like quantum mechanics, can we conclude that mind has its own entity separate from the body, which is accommodating it?

Long before introducing quantum mechanics or plank distance, point was defined as an entity, which does not have any dimension. By experience, we should have described it as smallest point that a piece of charcoal can create in a stone. But somebody's mind explored deeper in darkness where our every day experience could not reach. Now we know that the smallest possible size in space is plank distance 10-33. Beyond that we are exposed to geometrical point with no dimension and no size.

Minus numbers era does not have any objective meaning in macrocosm. But in 15th century, mathematician had to add it to mathematic field to be able to complete their calculations. Without looking to new era they could not close the field. Positive numbers were not enough to contain the whole mathematical calculations.

May be at that time mathematics was not considered as the basic foundation of reality. But today we have much more evidence to take mathematics as the basic framework of reality.

Long before creation of quantum mechanics, mathematical calculation led Nicolas Chuquet an Italian mathematician to square root of -1.75 in 1484. Of course he disregarded that portion of his calculation as meaningless with no reality. But this portion appeared and reappeared in future calculations of others. The mathematical field again appeared not to be complete and seemed open.

Square root of minus numbers could not be described in mathematical field of the time. Addition of a new subdivision was needed to create a complete and closed mathematical field. Gottfried Leibniz and others decided to add imaginary numbers to real numbers as a solution. But this imaginary numbers were generally considered unreal and impossible. Even Jerome Cardan who first had to use these numbers to create a formula considered them as meaningless, fictitious and imaginary.

Is this sound familiar? Space-time singularities are also considered meaningless and impossible. How about riddle of infinities in mathematical calculations?

"For Leibniz, imaginary numbers where a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit. Almost an amphibian between being and non-being ... ." 14 p97

Mind you that imaginary numbers are not countable. They do not have direct, measurable effect in our physical world. As such they are not finite. So they do not belong to space-time universe.

Then, in twentieth century when our understanding of reality got extended by looking at subatomic particles, we had to use square root of minus numbers to explain quantum behavior. All of the sudden, there was a use for imaginary numbers and it proved to be the framework for part of the reality.

Stephen Hawking says, "It turns out that a mathematical model involving imaginary time predicts not only effects we have already observed but also effects we have not been able to measure yet nevertheless believe in for other reasons." 6-p59

As a matter of fact, we are using complex numbers, which are a combination of real numbers and imaginary numbers to present a model for subatomic fields. Later on I will mention how wave particle and quantum leap and quantum tunneling and other quantum behaviors lead us to believe that quantum particles are appearing and disappearing from our space-time universe. And as such they alternate between positive integer and imaginary integer fields.

In fact mathematical calculations are ahead of us and are guiding us in understanding the deeper understanding of physical world. What created this mathematics?

"Non-computability in some aspects of consciousness and, specifically, in mathematical understanding, strongly suggests that non-computability should be a feature of all consciousness" Roger Penrose (Reference 5- p117)

If main component of our physical world like space, time and matter all have unbreakable basic units and beyond those limits they do not have any meaning, and so they are computable. And if mathematics is leading us to a non-computable entity as well, we should open our mind to a non-computable domain. If this leads us to duality, so be it. But mathematics is a whole system so should be the reality. We have to look for that part of reality which is a represented by negative and imaginary numbers.

Roger Penrose also wonders: "How one goes from computable discrete system (physical world) to a continuous system (mind)" (Reference 5- p102) And about theory of everything he advises; ...there could easily be a non-computational nature in the correct theory, if we ever find it." 5-p123". And further, "If there indeed exists some sort of contact with Platonic absolutes which our awareness enable us to achieve, and which can not be explained in terms of computational behavior, then that seems to me to be an important issue" 5- p125

Summary

I tried to explain how actual space, time and matter does not exist in our mind. What we have in our consciousness of such notions are just an image of them. Also I showed how mind is source of energy and information. As such our mind mimics the characteristics of proposed singularity and we may assume that it is extension of the singularity. The inter-connection between mind and macrocosm is our everyday experience. I also mentioned the numerous studies which reveals close connection between mind and quantum mechanics.

I also tried to show that mathematics are more progressive and we cannot explain it by just being the product of interaction between mind and physical world. In so many instances it is more advanced than our experiences and as the mater of fact physicists are following mathematics to offer theories and explain physical phenomena. So I concluded that mathematics emerge from our deeper consciousness.

The objectives of this text is to introduce mind as a separate entity and to emphasize that studying and exploring its connections with macrocosm and microcosm is essential part of studying reality.

References

5 -The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, Roger Penrose et al, Cambridge University Press, 1955

6 - The Universe in a Nutshell, Stephen Hawking, 2001, Bantam Books

8 - The Physics of Consciousness, Evan Harris Walker, 2000, Perseus Publishing

9 - The No locality of Mind, Chris Clarke, Tue Feb 4 16:22:05 GMT 1997

14 - Quantum Mind, Arnold Mindell, Lao Tse Press, 2000

19 - http://www.acsa2000.net/bcngroup/jponkp/ - See Chapter 1.

© Copyright Jeff Prideaux along with electronic copy right ACSA and The BCN Group. All Rights Reserved. Posted by permission of the author.

20 - http://www.merkabaweb.net/holo2.htm

44 - content.karger.com

45 - http://www.intuition.org/txt/pribram.htm

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by Mohsen Kermanshahi

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