Dedication
To
The Inhabitants of SPACE IN GENERAL
And H.C. IN PARTICULAR
This Work is Dedicated
By a Humble Native of Flatland
In the Hope that
Even as he was Initiated into the Mysteries
Of THREE Dimensions
Having been previously conversant
With ONLY TWO
So the Citizens of that Celestial Region
May aspire yet higher and higher
To the Secrets of FOUR FIVE OR EVEN SIX Dimensions
Thereby contributing
To the Enlargment of THE IMAGINATION
And the possible Development
Of that most and excellent Gift of MODESTY
Among the Superior Races
Of SOLID HUMANITY

How the Stranger vainly endeavoured to reveal to me in words the mysteries of Spaceland

AS SOON AS the sound of the Peace-cry of my departing Wife had died away, I began to approach the Stranger with the intention of taking a nearer view and of bidding him be seated: but his appearance struck me dumb and motionless with astonishment. Without the slightest symptoms of angularity he nevertheless varied every instant with graduations of size and brightness scarcely possible for any Figure within the scope of my experience. The thought flashed across me that I might have before me a burglar or cut-throat, some monstrous Irregular Isosceles, who, by feigning the voice of a Circle, had obtained admission somehow into the house, and was now preparing to stab me with his acute angle.

In a sitting-room, the absence of Fog (and the season happened to be remarkably dry), made it difficult for me to trust to Sight Recognition, especially at the short distance at which I was standing. Desperate with fear, I rushed forward with an unceremonious, “You must permit me, Sir –” and felt him. My Wife was right. There was not the trace of an angle, not the slightest roughness or inequality: never in my life had I met with a more perfect Circle. He remained motionless while I walked around him, beginning from his eye and returning to it again. Circular he was throughout, a perfectly satisfactory Circle; there could not be a doubt of it. Then followed a dialogue, which I will endeavour to set down as near as I can recollect it, omitting only some of my profuse apologies–for I was covered with shame and humiliation that I, a Square, should have been guilty of the impertinence of feeling a Circle. It was commenced by the Stranger with some impatience at the lengthiness of my introductory process.

Stranger. Have you felt me enough by this time? Are you not introduced to me yet?

I. Most illustrious Sir, excuse my awkwardness, which arises not from ignorance of the usages of polite society, but from a little surprise and nervousness, consequent on this somewhat unexpected visit. And I beseech you to reveal my indiscretion to no one, and especially not to my Wife. But before your Lordship enters into further communications, would he deign to satisfy the curiosity of one who would gladly know whence his visitor came?

Stranger. From Space, from Space, Sir: whence else?

I. Pardon me, my Lord, but is not your Lordship already in Space, your Lordship and his humble servant, even at this moment?

Stranger. Pooh! what do you know of Space? Define Space.

I. Space, my Lord, is height and breadth indefinitely prolonged.

Stranger. Exactly: you see you do not even know what Space is. You think it is of Two Dimensions only; but I have come to announce to you a Third–height, breadth, and length.

I.Your Lordship is pleased to be merry. We also speak of length and height, or breadth and thickness, thus denoting Two Dimensions by four names.

Stranger. But I mean not only three names, but Three Dimensions.

I.Would your Lordship indicate or explain to me in what direction is the Third Dimension, unknown to me?

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years left to live.” - A. Einstein

He was speaking in regard to the symbiotic relationship of all life on the planet. All part of a huge interconnected ecosystem, each element playing a role dependant on many other elements all working in concert creating the symphony of life. Should any part of the global body suffer, so does the whole body.

Source: ATCA: The Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance

You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist.- Mahatma Ghandi

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” - Mahatma Ghandi

Pat Shipman

The question of the nature of violence has been forcibly brought to my mind lately. It is not a thing I enjoy thinking about. Terrorist acts designed to hurt and terrify the ordinary populace of a region make no sense. Wanting to commit such acts of violence seems unimaginable; wanting to do so badly enough to spend years in preparation defies comprehension. Try as I might, I cannot put myself in the mind of someone who hates so deeply and thoroughly that he aspires to murder thousands of innocent people. I cannot understand.

Because I am trained as an anthropologist, I cannot help but take an evolutionary perspective in my drive to understand, to find some meaning in these events, or some logic, however warped. Why did our species evolve such a terrible capacity for violence? Is a propensity for violence against our own kind genetic? Are human beings irrevocably “ugly” apes? And how can someone disconnect so utterly from our species that a political or religious ideal seems more valuable than the lives of others? Even when the acts of a person or group seem incomprehensible, the anthropologist in me is reminded that these are indeed the acts of my species, the one to which I belong, the one whose evolutionary history I attempt to study and know.

We can say a few basic things about our primal selves. Human beings are fundamentally primates, and primates are fundamentally prey (rather than predator) species. We started our evolutionary life as beings who were neither very large nor particularly ferocious, who fed mostly on plants and looked over our shoulders in fear at every rustle in the tall grass or shadow in the sky. For millions of years, our ancestors were far more worried about being eaten than about killing something to eat, which came later. We clung together in social groups for mutual protection and aid. Knowing who is kin, knowing who is in your social group, has a deep importance to prey species like us. We need to know whose alarm call is meant for us, who might aid us in time of need, who is looking out for us. There is a life-and-death urgency about being social, about knowing your own group and sticking close to it.

This is why people do not, in the general course of things, live alone. The stories of those few individuals who find themselves without kin, without a hint of a social group, have become classics. One known to every beginning student of anthropology is the story of Ishi, the last member of a tribe of California Indians who finally, in despair, stumbled into a farm in a rural area. Imagine his plight. Imagine having no one in the world who could speak your language, no one who had any social obligations or blood relations to you, no one who cared if you lived or died, no one who knew you existed. Such aloneness is horrifying.

I would like to say that people helped Ishi and made a place in the world for him, but it was a poor imitation of a kin group. Anthropologists were found who could speak languages related to Ishi’s, so that in time he could communicate with others. He was given food and clothing and a place to live, which was for years the anthropology museum at the University of California, Berkeley, where he demonstrated his native arts and was intensively interviewed by anthropologists. Sadly, I do not think he ever loved again or was loved again. And the pity and empathy we feel for Ishi and others like him shows us how much we need those comforts of love, family, social group and safety. These are not optional luxuries, they are the stuff of survival.

With this evolutionary background, how are we to understand a group of people who share no empathy for us and find it acceptable maybe even admirable to bring fear and suffering to people throughout our land? These terrorists have erected a barrier between Us and Them and declared there will be no talking, no trading, no communication and no mercy across this barrier.

But why? Why have they cut Us off from Them, or themselves off from us? Why have they rejected our common humanity and in favor of what? These are hard questions that I must ponder for the rest of my life.

Kin, Clan, Conflict

I do know that humans, like the smart apes they are, have an elaborate hierarchy of affiliations. There is kin immediate and extended family and close behind that, neighbors, members of my social group, people to whom I can turn in need, people like me. Because we live a largely sedentary lifestyle (as opposed to being constantly nomadic, that is), this “neighbor” group is often defined by various kinds of physical proximity: living next door, going to the same schools, working in the same office, or shopping in the same grocery store. As we travel, go to work, go away to school, move here or there for various reasons, we add new layers of relatedness beyond those who occupy our original home turf. Going home is a terribly important concept to Americans, but lots of us have multiple “homes.”

And finally, being clever primates with large brains, we add layer upon layer of fictive kin or neighbors based on abstractions. We regard as close to us those who share our beliefs or our interests, whose hobbies, music, sports, religions, passions and occupations coincide with ours. And here is where things get complicated.

Once upon a time about 40,000 years ago, two new phenomena appeared that were to leave traces in the long archaeological record of our past. The first was a new kind of entity called an aggregation site. For the first time ever, bands of humans (loose affiliations of related individuals) began to meet with other such bands regularly. Archaeological sites preserve remains of gatherings of unprecedented size, where lots of groups came together and stayed for a period of time. It is not difficult to imagine these aggregation sites as being the remnants of events much like swap meets or flea markets prolonged into weeks or maybe months. We know from the preserved artifacts that people came from many miles around, presumably to exchange the valuable goods local in their area for ones found in another. And we imagine that some hoped to find mates from another group that was appropriately distant (not incestuous) and yet acceptably close (not too foreign). Before the appearance of aggregation sites, population densities were apparently so low that bands would run into perhaps only one or two other local bands in an individual’s entire lifetime. The appearance of aggregation sites marks a real change in the experiences of individuals and in the extent to which they experienced novelty.

Because humans began to see strangers for the first time, the second phenomenon appeared. That took the form of items of personal adornment: crude jewelry, probably body paint and tattooing, and utilitarian objects and clothing that were decorated in the style of one’s home group. These objects were ways of declaring an affiliation with a particular group; wearing them was a way of saying “I am from the people who hunt reindeer at the river crossing in the cold woods” or “I am a shoreline person who gathers mollusks for food and makes their shells into adornments.” There was no need for such emblems colors, in the modern parlance of urban gangs when you never met anyone who had not known of you or your kin from the time of your birth. Once there were strangers, there was a new need to strengthen and publicly proclaim affiliations. These were the first steps to war.

Anthropologists have argued that war itself arose only after humans were tied to the land, after the invention of agriculture. A family who has cleared a field, seeded it, and tended and watered the growing plants has a large investment of time and energy in that particular piece of land, and that crop. There is a reason for defense of territory far beyond the need experienced by hunter-gatherers who travel regularly over large ranges. But long before the invention of agriculture at about 12,000 years ago, there were social groups and strangers, there was Us and Them. Making that distinction lies at the heart of all violence within our species. It is a much more ancient propensity than agriculture. Even chimpanzees and other primates at times resort to fatal violence against their own kind.

Toward a Greater “Us”

That violence and exclusiveness lie so deeply in our biological heritage, intertwined with the nurturing concepts of kin and affiliation, home and neighbor, is a grim thought. Humans have been fighting and killing other humans for years, and years and years. Over time, we have shifted the identity of those for whom we will fight. It is no longer simply kinfolk or immediate neighbors; it is vast groups like “those who proclaim themselves citizens of this thing we call a nation” or “those who follow the practices of this holy man.” Perhaps we can shift the identity of Us still further, extend the boundaries still more widely until there is no longer a Them to fight, but only an Us who must survive together or not at all. If violence is in our nature, as it seems to be, there is no other hope.

I remember some relevant words from the classic movie The African Queen. They were spoken by Katharine Hepburn, who played a missionary spinster, Rosie, to Humphrey Bogart’s ragtag steamboat captain, Mr. Allnutt. Sitting with her spine straight and proud, her expression resolute, and without lifting her eyes from her devotional reading, Hepburn proclaimed:

Nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above.

Source: american scientist

There is no greater paradox,
then the awakening to a higher self,
for paradoxically it is losing the self,
in the realization that all is part of the higher self,
the higher state of being.

Exodus 3, 14 And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

Luke 17, 21 Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

For that to happen one must first awaken to the realization that there is a higher reality.
A most perilous path for most will fall to the religious state, the law-man state. The belief that one will be saved by self-righteousness in the following of the law.
Instead one needs to learn that we are not saved by the letter of the law, but by the spirit of the law. The law makes sin know to us. We are called to fulfill the law by written it on our hearts, to love the other as oneself, a higher nature from which the law follows.

Is it possible with man to turn the other check? To not fight evil with evil? To love thy enemy? To love the other as oneself?

Mat 19, 26 But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.
 
On the road to the higher self the mind has to give in to the experience, to surrender its precepts, air castles, ego and instead be infused with His inner light. Once the higher reality dawns, the things of this world turn out to be the vanity of vanities. 

Mat 6, 21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Mat 13, 44 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.

The awakening to the higher self is also the reason behind the speaking in parables by Jesus, the reason of the meaning given to those within, those that hear and see, and those still outside.
The Gospel calls the awakening to the higher self the baptism with the spirit, the spiritual state or true Christianity as John Wesley called it.

PRESS-RELEASE 9th February 2002

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE REMAINS A MYSTERY (pp 2010, 2039)

Authors of a Dutch study in this week?s issue of THE LANCET conclude that medical explanations cannot account for the phenomenon known as near-death experience (NDE). Only a relatively small proportion of patients who became
clinically dead (resulting in oxygen deprivation to the brain) reported NDEs after successful cardiac resuscitation.

Some people report a near-death experience (NDE) after a life-threatening crisis. Most previous NDE research has been retrospective and is therefore of limited value. Pim van Lommel and colleagues from Hospital Rijnstate,
Arnhem, The Netherlands, aimed to establish the cause of this experience and assess factors that affected its frequency, depth, and content.

344 cardiac patients who were successfully resuscitated after cardiac arrest in ten Dutch hospitals were prospectively studied. All patients had been clinically dead. NDE was defined as the reported memory of all impressions
during a special state of consciousness, including specific elements such as out-of-body experience, pleasant feelings, and seeing a tunnel, a light, deceased relatives, or a life review. The investigators compared demographic, medical, pharmacological, and psychological data between patients who reported NDE and patients who did not (controls) after
resuscitation. In a longitudinal study of life changes after NDE, the investigators compared the groups 2 and 8 years later.

62 patients (18%) reported NDE, of whom 41 (12%) described a core (deep) experience. Occurrence of the experience was not associated with duration of cardiac arrest or unconsciousness, medication, or fear of death before
cardiac arrest. NDEs were more common among people younger than 60 years; deeper NDE experiences were more common among women. Substantially more patients who had an NDE-especially a deep experience-died during or shortly after NDE-related hospital stays. At two-year follow-up, people who had NDE had a significant increase in belief in an afterlife and decrease in fear of death compared with people who had not had NDE. At eight-year follow-up, people who had reported NDE generally did not show any fear of death and strongly believed in an afterlife, in contrast to people who had not reported NDE.

In an accompanying Commentary (p 2010), Christopher French from Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK, cautions that problems with NDE definition and reliance on patients? memory about NDE makes clear interpretation of the study difficult. He concludes: Perhaps the switching of classification of patients represents nothing more than changes in definition of NDE at different stages of the study. This possibility may receive some support from the fact that, at the 2-year follow-up, over a third of the 17 patients who had originally reported superficial NDEs were then deemed to not have had NDEs at all. Another possibility is ordinary forgetting. Such problems must be rectified in future studies because their overall effect would be to blur the distinction between NDE and non-NDE-patients. This overlap would make it much more difficult to identify possible physiological and psychological differences between the groups.

Contact: Dr Pim van Lommel, c/o Publicity and Press Department, Hospital Rijnstate, PO Box 9555, 6800 TA Arnhem, Netherlands; T) +31 26 378 6433; F) +31 26 378 6079; E) pimvanlommel AT wanadoo.nl

Dr Christopher C French, Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London SE14 6NW, UK; T) (mobile) +44 (0) 7946638587; E) c.french AT gold.ac.uk

http://www.thelancet.com/search/results?search_mode=cluster&search_cluster=thelancet&search_text1=nde

Today a Dutch television program aired a program on a current psychological study conducted in a Dutch hospital in which magnetic fields are used to bring down the “hearing of voices”.
A scan of the brain revealed that the area in the brain that is responsible for hearing becomes active at the moment the patient signals “hearing voices”. So to the patient they are as real as we would perceive hearing only in this case the ear is not involved.
These areas are treated with electro magnetic fields which brought down the “hearing of voices” considerably to the extent that the person could function again almost normally. This pathology is normally labelled psychotic as these voices tend to have a live of there own which negatively influences the patient.
The results are promising but still preliminary. The question it raises is: How do electro-magnetic fields influence the brain?

http://www.netwerk.tv/index.jsp?p=items&r=netwerk&a=234105

An approach to the mind-body problem based on physical laws has been advocated by several thinkers. Quantum Theory has been particularly intriguing for scientists eager to provide a physical explanation of consciousness.

Loosely speaking, the point is that consciousness is unlikely to arise from classical properties of matter (the more we understand the structure and the fabric of the brain, the less we understand how consciousness can occur at all), which are well known and well testable. But Quantum Theory allows for a new concept of matter altogether, which may well leave cracks for consciousness, for something that is not purely material or purely extra-material. Of course, the danger in this way of thinking is to relate consciousness and Quantum only because they are both poorly understood: what they certainly have in common is a degree of “magic” that makes both mysterious and unattainable…

On the other hand, it is certainly true that all current neurobiological descriptions of the brain are based on Newton’s Physics, even if it is well known that Newton’s Physics has its limitations. First of all, Newton’s Physics is an offshoot of Descartes division of the universe in matter and spirit, and it deals only with matter. Secondly, neurobiologists assume that the brain and its parts behave like classical objects, and that quantum effects are negligible, even while the “objects” they are studying get smaller and smaller. What neurobiologists are doing when they study the microstructure of the brain from a Newtonian perspective is equivalent to organizing a trip to the Moon on the basis of Aristotle’s Physics, neglecting Newton’s theory of gravitation.

No wonder most neurobiologists reach the conclusion that Physics cannot explain consciousness, since they are using a Physics that 1. was designed to study matter and leave out consciousness and that 2. does not work in the microworld. Not surprisingly, it has been claimed that all current neurobiological models are computationally equivalent to a Turing machine.

The true pioneer of this field is the biologist Alfred Lotka, who in 1924, when Quantum Theory had barely been born, proposed that the mind controls the brain by modulating the quantum jumps that would otherwise lead to a completely random existence.

The first detailed quantum model of consciousness was probably the American physicist Evan Walker’s synaptic tunneling model (1970), in which electrons can “tunnel” between adjacent neurons, thereby creating a virtual neural network overlapping the real one. It is this virtual nervous system that produces consciousness and that can direct the behavior of the real nervous system. The real nervous system operates by means of synaptic messages. The virtual one operates by means of the quantum effect of tunneling (particles passing through an energy barrier that classically they should not be able to climb). The real one is driven by classical laws, the virtual one by quantum laws. Consciousness is therefore driven by quantum laws, even if the brain’s behavior can be described by classical laws.

A few researchers have invoked another quantum effect, Bose-Einstein condensation (theoretically predicted in 1925 and first achieved in a gas in 1995), which is a general case of superconductivity. A Bose-Einstein condensate is the equivalent of a laser, except that it is the atoms, rather than the photons, that behave identically. Its atoms behave like they were a single atom. Technically speaking, as temperature drops each atom’s wave grows, until the waves of all the atoms begin to overlap and eventually merge. After they merged, the atoms are located within the same region in space, they travel at the same speed, they vibrate at the same frequency, etc.: they become indistinguishable. The atoms have reached the lowest possible energy, but Heisenberg’s principle makes it impossible for this to be zero energy: it is called “zero-point” energy, the minimum energy an atom can have. The intriguing feature of a Bose-Einstein condensate is that the many parts of a system not only behave as a whole, they become whole. Their identities merge in such a way that they lose their individuality.

In 1986 the British physicist Herbert Froehlich suggested that such condensation can be achieved in Nature by biological organisms. In particular, it should arise when biological oscillators which are in a nonequilibrium state (such as all plants and animals) are maintained at constant temperature. Biological oscillators of this kind are pervasive in nature: living matter is made of water and other biomolecules equipped with electrical dipoles, which react to external stimuli with a spontaneous breakdown of their rotational symmetry. The biological usefulness of such biological oscillators is that, like laser light, they can amplify signals and encode information (e.g., they can “remember” an external stimulus).

Pelgrims’s note: We are called children of the stars because of a process called the triple- alpha process. All living known is carbon based. The big bang process also created Hydrogen in a 4/12 ratio. 

In 1989 the British phychiatrist Ian Marshall showed similarities between the holistic properties of condensates and those of consciousness, and suggested that consciousness may arise from the excitation of such a Bose-Einstein condensate. In Marshall’s hypothesis, the brain contains a Froelich-style condensate, and, whenever the condensate is excited by an electrical field, conscious experience occurs. The brain would maintain dynamical coherence thanks to an underlying quantum coherent state (due, precisely, to the properties of such a condensate).

Drawing from Quantum Mechanics and from Bertrand Russell’s idea that consciousness provides a kind of “window” onto the brain, the philosopher Michael Lockwood advanced a theory of consciousness as a process of perception of brain states.

First he noted that Special Relativity implies that mental states must be physical states (mental states must be in space given that they are in time). Then Lockwood interpreted the role of the observer in Quantum Mechanics as the role of consciousness in the physical world (as opposed to a simple interference with the system being observed). Lockwood argued that sensations must be intrinsic attributes of physical states of the brain: in quantum lingo, each observable attribute (e.g., each sensation) corresponds to an observable of the brain. Consciousness scans the brain to look for sensations. It does not create them, it just seeks them.

In 1986 John Eccles, the British neurophysiologist who discovered neurotransmitters, has speculated that synapses in the cortex respond in a probabilistic manner to neural excitation, a probability that could well be governed by quantum uncertainty given the extremely small size of the synapsis’”microsite” that emits the neurotransmitter. If this is true, Eccles speculates that an immaterial mind (in the form of “psychons”) controls the quantum “jumps” and turns them into voluntary excitations of the neurons that account for body motion.

Conscious matter

The American physicist Nick Herbert has been even more specific on the similarities between Quantum Theory and consciousness. Herbert thinks that consciousness is a pervasive process in nature. Mind is as fundamental a component of the universe as elementary particles and forces. Mind can be detected by three features of quantum theory: randomness, thinglessness (objects acquire attributes only once they are observed) and interconnectedness (John Bell’s discovery that once two particles have interacted they remain connected). Herbert thinks that these three features of inert matter can account for three basic features of mind: free will, essential ambiguity, and deep psychic connectedness. Scientists may be vastly underestimating the quantity of consciousness in the universe.

The computer scientist James Culbertson, a pioneer of research on robots, has even speculated that consciousness may be a relativistic feature of spacetime. In his opinion, too, consciousness permeates all of nature, so that every object has a degree of consciousness.

According to Relativity, our lives are world lines in spacetime. Spacetime does not happen, it always exists. It is our brain that shows us a movie of matter evolving in time.

All spacetime events are conscious: they are conscious of other spacetime events. The “experience” of a spacetime event is static, a frozen region of spacetime events. All the subjective features of the “psychospace” of an observer can be completely derived from the objective features of the region of spacetime that the observer is connected to. Special circuits in our brain create the impression of a time flow, of a time travel through the region of spacetime events connected to the brain.

Memory of an event is re-experiencing that spacetime event, which is fixed in spacetime. We don’t store an event, we only keep a link to it. Conscious memory is not in the brain, is in spacetime.

The inner life of a system is its spacetime history. To clarify his view, Culbertson presents the case of two robots. First a robot is built and learns German, then another robot is built which is identical to the first one. Culbertson claims that the second robot does not speak German, even if it is identical to the one which speaks German. Their spacetime histories are different. At the same time, Culbertson thinks that our consciousness is much more than an illusory travel through spacetime, and it can, in turn, influence reality. Quantum Thoery prescribes that reality be a sequence of random quantum jumps. Culbertson believes that they are not random but depend on the system’s spacetime history, i.e. on its inner life.

Tripartite Idealism

The American physicist Henry Stapp holds that classical Physics cannot explain consciousness because it cannot explain how the whole can be more than the parts. In Quantum Mechanics, on the other hand, the relationship between the parts and the whole is completely different. Stapp therefore advances a “quantum theory of consciousness” and bases it on Heisenberg’s interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (that reality is a sequence of collapses of wave functions, i.e. of quantum discontinuities). He observes that this view is similar to William James’s view of the mental life as “experienced sense objects”. His view harks back to the heydays of Quantum Theory, when it was clear to its founders that “science is what we know”. Science specifies rules that connect bits of knowledge. Each of us is a “knower” and our joint knowledge of the universe is the subject of Science. Quantum Theory is therefore a “knowledge-based” discipline. This view was “pragmatic” because it prescribes how to make experiments, and it was separating the system to be observed from the observer and from the instrument. Von Neumann introduced an “ontological” approach to this knowledge-based discipline, which brought the observer and the instrument in the state of the system. Stapp describes Von Neumann’s view of Quantum Theory through a simple definition: “the state of the universe is an objective compendium of subjective knowings”. This statement describes the fact that the state of the universe is represented by a wave function which is a compendium of all the wave functions that each of us can cause to collapse with her or his observations. That is why it is a collection of subjective acts, although an objective one. Stapp follows the logical consequences of this approach and achieves a new form of idealism: all that exists is that subjective knowledge, therefore the universe is now about matter, it is about subjective experience. Quantum Theory does not talk about matter, it talks about our perceiving matter. Stapp rediscovers George Berkeley’s idealism: we only know our perceptions (observations). Stapp’s model of consciousness is tripartite. Reality is a sequence of discrete events in the brain. Each event is an increase of knowledge. That knowledge comes from observing “systems”. Each event is driven by three processes that operate together:

The “Schroedinger process” is a mechanical, deterministic, process that predicts the state of the system (in a fashion similar to Newton’s Physics: given its state at a given time, we can use equations to calculate its state at a different time). The only difference is that Schroedinger’s equations describe the state of a system as a set of possibilities, rather than just one certainty.
The “Heisenberg process” is a conscious choice that we make: the formalism of Quantum Theory implies that we can know something only when we ask Nature a question. This implies, in turn, that we have a degree of control over Nature. Depending on which question we ask, we can affect the state of the universe. Stapp mentions the Quantum Zeno effect, as a well known process in which we can alter the course of the universe by asking questions (it is the phenomenon by which a system is “freezed” if we keep observing the same observable very rapidly). We have to make a conscious decision about which question to ask Nature (which observable to observe).Otherwise nothing is going to happen.
The “Dirac process” gives the answer to our question. Nature replies, and, as far as we can tell, the answer is totally random. Once Nature has replied, we have learned something: we have increased our knowledge. This is a change in the state of the universe, which directly corresponds to a change in the state of our brain. Technically, there occurs a reduction of the wave function compatible with the fact that has been learned.
Stapp’s interpretation of Quantum Theory is that there are many knowers. Each knower’s act of knowledge (each individual increment of knowledge) results in a new state of the universe. One person’s increment of knowledge changes the state of the entire universe, and, of course, it changes it for everybody else. Quantum Theory is not about the behavior of matter, but about our knowledge of such behavior. “Thinking” is a sequence of events of knowing, driven by those three processes. Instead of dualism or materialism, one is faced with a sort of interactive “triality”, all aspects of which are actually mind-like: The physical aspect of Nature (the Schroedinger equation) is a compendium of subjective knowledge. The conscious act of asking a question is what drives the actual transition from one state to another, i.e. the evolution of the universe. And then there is a choice from the outside, the reply of Nature, which, as far as we can tell, is random. Stapp’s conclusions somehow mirror the ideas of the American psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwarz, who is opposed to the mechanistic approach of Psychiatry and emphasizes the power of consciousness to control the brain. Stapp revives idealism by showing that Quantum Theory is about knowledge, not matter. The universe is a repository of knowledge, that we have access to and upon which our consciousness has control.

Holonomic Consciousness

The “holonomic” model of memory, advanced by psychologist Karl Pribram, is based on the hologram. Many properties of the brain are the same properties that are commonly associated with holograms: memory is distributed in the brain and memories do not disappear all of a sudden, but slowly fade away. Holograms are the product of a physical process that preserves the three-dimensional quality of an object. Normally, lasers are employed to record the diffraction pattern of an object, from which a 3-dimensional image of the object can be rebuilt. In Pribram’s opinion a sensory perception is transformed in a “brain wave”, a pattern of electromagnetical activation that propagates through the brain just like the wavefront in a liquid. This crossing of the brain provides the interpretation of the sensory perception in the form of a “memory wave”, which in turn crosses the brain. The various waves that travel through the brain can interfere. The interference of a memory wave and a perceptual (e.g., visual) wave generates a structure that resembles an hologram. Pribram employs Fourier transformations to deal with the dualism between spacetime and spectrum, and Gabor’s phase space to embed spacetime and spectrum. All perceptions (and not only colors or sounds) can be analyzed into their component frequencies of oscillation and therefore treated by Fourier analysis. Dirac’s “least action principle” (which favors the least expenditure of energy) constrains trajectories in such a space. Gabor’s uncertainty principle sets a limit at which both frequency and spacetime can be concurrently determined (the fundamental minimum is Gabor’s “quantum of information”). Structure and process are two aspects of the same entity, distinguished only by the scale of observation (from a distance an entity looks like a structure, but close enough it is a process). In Pribram’s theory, therefore, the formalism of Quantum Theory applies to the modeling of brain functions themselves (brain microprocesses and physical microprocesses can be described by the same formalism). Incidentally, Pribram suggested that consciousness may occur primarily in dendritic-dendritic processing and that axonal firings may support primarily automatic, non-conscious activities.Quantum brain dynamics

Quantum-gravitational Consciousness

One of the strongest proponents of a theory of consciousness founded on Quantum Theory is Roger Penrose in person, one of the leading British physicists of our times. In his opinion, consciousness must be a quantum phenomenon because neurons are too big to account for consciousness. Inside neurons there is a “cytoskeleton”, the structure that holds cells together, whose “microtubules” (hollow protein cylinders 25-nanometers in diameter) control the function of synapses. Penrose believes that consciousness is a manifestation of the quantum cytoskeletal state and its interplay between quantum and classical levels of activity. The theory exposed by Penrose and his close American associate Stuart Hameroff is very detailed. The story begins with Penrose’s distinction between “subjective” and “objective” reduction. Subjective reduction is what happens when an observer measures a quantity in a quantum system: the system is not in any specific state (the system is in a “superposition” of possible states) until it is observed, the observation causes the system to reduce (or “collapse”) to a specific state. This is the only reduction known to traditional Quantum Theory. Objective reduction is a Penrose discovery, part of his attempt at unifying Relativity Theory and Quantum Theory. Superpositioned states each have their own space-time geometry. Under special circumstances, which microtubules are suitable for, the separation of space-time geometry of the superpositioned states (i.e., the “warping” of these space-times) reaches a point (the quantum gravity threshold) where the system must choose one state. The system must then spontaneously and abruptly collapse to that one state. So, objective reduction is a type of collapse of the wave function which occurs when the universe must choose between significantly differing spacetime geometries. This “self-collapse” results in particular “conformational states” that regulate neural processes. These conformational states can interact with neighboring states to represent, propagate and process information. Each self-collapse corresponds to a discrete conscious event. Sequences of events then give rise to a “stream” of consciousness. The proteins somehow “tune” the objective reduction which is thus self-organized, or “orchestrated”. In concluding, the quantum phenomenon of objective reduction controls the operation of the brain through its effects on coherent flows inside microtubules of the cytoskeleton. In general, the collapse of the wave function is what gives the laws of nature a non-algorithmic element. Otherwise we would simply be machines and we would have no consciousness. Therefore, Penrose and Hameroff believe that “protoconscious” information is encoded in space-time geometry at the fundamental Planck scale and that a self-organizing Planck-scale process results in consciousness. This means that Penrose believes in a Platonic scenario of conscious states that exist in a world of their own, and to which our minds have access; except that his “world of ideas” is a physicist’s world: quantum spin networks encode proto-conscious states and different configurations of quantum spin geometry represent varieties of conscious experience. Access to these states (or consciousness as we know it) originates when a self-organizing process (the objective reduction) somehow coupled with neural activity collapses quantum wave functions at Planck-scale geometry. There is a separate mental world, but it is grounded in the physical world.

A Physics of Consciousness

Now that legions of physicists are delving into the topic, physical models of consciousness abound. One has to do with other dimensions. The unification theories that attempt at unifying General Relativity (i.e. gravitation) and Quantum Theory (i.e., the weak, electrical and strong forces) typically add new dimensions to the four ones we experience. These dimensions differ from space in that they are bound (actually, rolled up in tiny tubes) and in that they only exist for changes to occur in particle properties. Saul-Paul Sirag’s hyperspace, for example, contains many physical dimensions and many mental dimensions (time is one of the dimensions they have in common). The physicist Erich Harth is trying to explain consciousness by means of a process that relies on “positive” feedback. Feedback can be negative or positive. Negative feedback is the familiar one, which has to do with stabilizing a process, in particular its input with its output. Positive feedback works in the opposite direction, at the edge of instability: the signal is amplified by itself, weakening the relationship between input and output. Harth thinks that a loop of positive feedback spreads through different areas of the brain and provides “selective amplification. If that be the case, then unification of consciousness would occur at the bottom of the sensory pyramid, not at the top. The American physicist Alwyn Scott applies Eigen’s model of “hypercycles” to consciousness. He makes consciousness stem from a procedure which is analogous to the one that generates life: simple cells originate complex cells which originate hypercomplex cells.

A critique of Neuroscience

All contemporary Neuroscience is based on classical Physics. No surprise that it derives a view of the brain as a set of mechanical laws: that is the “only” view that classical Physics can derive. No surprise that it cannot explain how consciousness arises, since there is no consciousness in classical Physics: it was erased from the study of matter by Descartes’ dualism (that mind and matter are separate), on which foundations Newton erected classical Physics (the science of matter, which does not deal with mind). By definition, Descartes’ dualism predicts that mind cannot be explain from matter, and Newton’s Physics is an expression of dualism. Which means that dualism predicts that Newton’s Physics cannot explain mind. Neuroscientists who are looking for consciousness miss that simple syllogism: they are looking for consciousness using a tool that is labeled “this tool does not deal with consciousness”. Contemporary Neuroscience rests on the idea that a physical system is made of independent parts which interact only with their immediate neighbords and whose behavior over time is deterministic. This is the principle behind all computational models of the brain. Within this paradigm, a mind is the product of a brain, which is one particular system of the many that populate the universe. This is a very interesting paradigm, but it is not what Physics prescribes today. It is what Physics prescribed a century ago, before it was showed to be wrong.

The New Materialism

A contemporary American philosopher of the mind, David Chalmers, argues that consciousness cannot be explained with a reductionist approach, because it does not belong to the realm of matter. Chalmers proposes to expand Science in a fashion that is still compatible with today’s Science (in the areas where it is successful) and that allows for a dualist approach. Chalmers distinguishes between a phenomenal concept of mind (the way it feels) and a psychological concept of mind (what it does). Every mental property is either a phenomenal property, a psychological one or a combination of the two. The mind-body problem is therefore made of two parts, one that deals with the mental faculties and one that deals with how/why those mental faculties also give rise to awareness of them (Jackendoff’s “mind-mind problem”). Pain, for example, is both a material entity that can be analyzed functionally, in terms of its effect on behavior, and the feeling of pain. The same distinction applies to consciousness, with psychological consciousness being commonly referred to as “awareness”; but phenomenal consciousness always comes with psychological consciousness. Awareness is having access to information that may affect behavior. Chalmers’ brand of monism admits both physical and non-physical features in the world. His dualism is different from Descartes’ in that it claims that “consciousness is a feature of the world” which is somehow related to its physical properties. A new, fundamental, irreducible feature (a set of “protophenomenal” properties) must be added to space-time, mass, charge, spin, etc., and a set of “psychophysical” laws (explaining how phenomenal properties depend on physical properties) must be added to the laws of nature. Chalmers outlines a few candidate psychophysical laws, such as the principle of coherence between consciousness and cognition and the principle of organizational invariance. The former states a tight relationship between the structure of consciousness and functional organization. The latter states that every system organized in the appropriate way will experience the same conscious states, regardless of what substance it is made of, i.e., consciousness is “organizationally invariant”. From these principles, it follows that consciousness is due to the functional organization of the brain. It also follows that anything having the proper functional organization can have consciousness, regardless of the material it is made of. Still looking for fundamental laws of consciousness, Charmers offers an interpretation of his theory based on the dualism between information and pattern: information is what pattern is from the inside. Consciousness is information about the pattern of the self. Information becomes therefore the link between the physical and the conscious. Ultimately, everything in the universe may be conscious, at least to some degree.

A Darwinist Theory of Consciousness

If we assume that a similar law of evolution is responsible for all living phenomena, from the creation of species to the immune system, and we admit that mind is one of them, then a possible scenario emerges, which is compatible with the latest neurophysiological findings. Thoughts are continuously and randomly generated, just like the immune system generates antibodies all the time without really knowing which ones will be useful. Thoughts survive for a while, giving rise to minds that compete for control of the brain. At each time, one mind prevails because it can better cope with the situation. Which mind prevails has an influence on which thoughts will be generated in the future. In practice, a mind is the mental equivalent of a phylogenetic thread (of a branch of the tree of life). We are conscious, by definition, only of the mind that is prevailing. In ancient times the minds generared chaotically were simply shouted to the “rational” apparatus of the brain, which would act as the mediator with the environment: it would translate “hallucinations” into actions. and the result of actions into emotions, and emotions would either reinforce or weaken the mind in control. Emotions would select the mind. This is more evident in children, which explore many unrelated thoughts in a few minutes: whatever the various minds produce. Later, the adult is better adjusted to select “minds” and does not need to try them all out. The adult has been “biased” by natural selection to recognize the “best” minds. The 40 Hz radiation may simply be a way of scanning all available thoughts and of reporting emotions back to all minds (in other words, of reading the outputs of the minds, in the form of thoughts, and of feeding them new inputs, in the form of emotions).

A Materialistic Theory of Consciousness

“what” is consciousness? What substance is it made of?

Many attempts have been made at explaining consciousness by reducing it to something else. To no avail. There is no way that our sensations can be explained in terms of particles. So, how does consciousness arise in matter? Maybe it doesn’t arise, it is always there. I am conviced that, no matter how detailed an account is provided of the neural processes that led to an action (say, a smile), that account will never explain where the feeling associated to that action (say, happiness) came from. No theory of the brain can explain why and how consciousness happens, if it assumes that consciousness is somehow created by some neural entity which is completely different in structure, function and behavior from our feelings. From a logical standpoint, the only way out of this dead-end is to accept that consciousness must be a physical property. When we try to explain consciousness by reducing it to electrochemical processes, we put ourselves in a situation similar to a scientist who decided to explain electrical phenomena by using gravity. Electrical phenomena can be explained only if we assume that electricity comes from a fundamental property of matter (i.e. from a property that is present in all matter starting from the most fundamental constituents) and that, under special circumstances, enables a particular configuration of matter to exhibit “electricity”. Similarly, if consciousness comes from a fundamental property of matter (from a property that is present in all matter starting from the most fundamental constituents), then, and only then, we can study why and how, under special circumstances, that property enables a particular configuration of matter (e.g., the brain) to exhibit “consciousness”. Any paradigm that tries to manufacture consciousness out of something else is doomed to failure. Things don’t just happen. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Consciousness doesn’t come simply from the act of putting neurons together. It doesn’t appear like magic. Conductivity seems to appear by magic in some configurations of matter (e.g. metallic objects), but there’s no magic: just a fundamental property of matter, the electrical charge, which is present in every single particle of this universe, a property which is mostly useless but that under the proper circumstances yields the phenomenon known as conductivity. Particles are not conductors by themselves, just like they are not conscious, and most things made of particles (wood, plastic, glass, etc. etc.) are not conductors (and maybe have no consciousness), but each single particle in the universe has an electrical charge and each single particle in the universe has a property, say, C. That property C is the one that allows our brain to be conscious. I am not claiming that each single particle is conscious or that each single piece of matter in the universe is conscious. I am only arguing that each single particle has this property C which, under the special circumstances of our brain configuration (and maybe other brain configurations as well and maybe even things with no brain) yields consciousness. Just like electricity and gravitation are macroscopic properties that are caused by microscopic properties of the constituents, so consciousness may be a macroscopic property of our brain that is caused by a microscopic property of its constituents. Just like electrical phenomena can only be reduced to smaller-scale electrical phenomena (all the way to the charge of each single constituent), so consciousness can only be reduced to smaller-scale conscious phenomena. Any theory that tries to manufacture consciousness from other properties of matter is doomed. Even Penrose’s, because he too makes consciousness appear by magic out of unconscious matter (molecules that are unconscious suddenly acquire consciousness when organized in a cytoskeleton).

My theory is not dualistic and is not materialistic. Like dualists, I admit the existence of consciousness as separate from the physical properties of matter as we know them; but at the same time, like materialists, I consider consciousness as arising from a physical property (that we have not discovered yet) that behaves in a fundamentally different way from the other physical properties. So in a sense it is not a “physical” property, but it is still a property of all matter. Mine is an identity theory, in that I think that mental correspond to neural states, but it goes beyond identity because I also think that the property yielding consciousness is common to all matter, whether it performs neural activity or not. What made Descartes believe in dualism is the unity of consciousness. But electrical conductors also exhibit a unity of electricity, and still electrical phenomena can be reduced to a physical property of matter The main problem is the lack of an empirical test for consciousness. We cannot know whether a being is conscious or not. We cannot “measure” its consciousness. We cannot rule out that every object in the universe, including each elementary particle, has consciousness: we just cannot detect it. Even when I accept that other human beings are conscious a) I base my assumption on similarity of behavior, not on an actual “observation” of their consciousness; and b) I somehow sense that some people (poets and philosophers, for example) may be more conscious than other people (lawyers and doctors, for example). The trouble is that our mind is capable only of observing conscious phenomena at its own level and within itself. Our mind is capable of observing only one conscious phenomenon: itself. A good way to start is to analyze why consciousness is limited to the brain. Why does consciousness apply only to the brain? What is special about the brain that cannot be found anywhere else? If the brain is made of common matter, of well-known constituents, what is it that turns that matter conscious when it is configured as a brain, but not when it is configured as a foot? And why does it stop being conscious if oxygen or blood are not supplied?

Further Reading

Chalmers David: THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press, 1996)
Culbertson James: THE MINDS OF ROBOTS (University of Illinois Press, 1963)
Culbertson James: SENSATIONS MEMORIES AND THE FLOW OF TIME (Cromwell Press, 1976)
Eccles John: EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN (Routledge, 1989)
Eccles John: THE SELF AND ITS BRAIN (Springer, 1994)
Globus Gordon: THE POSTMODERN BRAIN (John Benjamins, 1995)
Herbert Nick: ELEMENTAL MIND (Dutton, 1993)
Lockwood Michael: MIND, BRAIN AND THE QUANTUM (Basil Blackwell, 1989)
Marshall I.N., Zohar Danah: QUANTUM SELF : HUMAN NATURE AND CONSCIOUSNESS DEFINED BY THE NEW PHYSICS
Penrose Roger: THE EMPEROR’S NEW MIND (Oxford Univ Press, 1989)
Penrose Roger: SHADOWS OF THE MIND (Oxford University Press, 1994)
Pribram Karl: LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (Prentice Hall, 1971)
Pribram Karl: BRAIN AND PERCEPTION (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990)
Searle John: THE REDISCOVERY OF THE MIND (MIT Press, 1992)
Stapp Henry: MIND, MATTER AND QUANTUM MECHANICS (Springer-Verlag, 1993)
Yasue Kunio & Jibu Mari: QUANTUM BRAIN DYNAMICS AND CONSCIOUSNESS (John Benjamins, 1995)

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