In the last column, How We See What We See, I set forth an explanation for how our eyes collect the expanding flows of light, each with a different intensity. The intensities of these flows, minor though they may be, represent the relative distances of the hard objects around us and allow our minds to reconstruct a picture of those hard objects, a representation of reality, the reality we can recall when we close our eyes and imagine reality. Any structure in the brain that could produce such a picture would need to be capable of using the different intensities of these flows to reconstruct a picture of reality. It would, therefore, have to be a structure that reflected the flows operating it, and it would have to explain how the flows operated it.
I don't know how many times a day I hear the term mind. I doubt a person reading this column goes long without using the term. Things come to mind, someone lost his mind, plants have minds that can feel pain (okay, that was facetious), someone didn't use his mind, but to empirical science, the mind doesn't exist. I defy any empirical scientist to go a week without using the word mind. It's all around us. It's so natural to consider we have a mind, its second nature, like gravity, but empirical science denies its existence. We know we can think, we know we can remember, we know we can come up with thoughts we've never thought before simply by putting different thoughts together, we know we can make choices, but this doesn't sway empirical science from its denial of the mind.
Empirical science, as it usually does, decided long before it was aware of things like electrons that the mind didn't exist simply because it cut up a bunch of brains and couldn't find a mind. Once empirical science decides something is so, it's so forever more because empirical science, while claiming to be self-correcting, never questions its own basic conclusions, all made long before we had the measurable knowledge of the world we have today. When empirical science couldn't find the mind in the brain, it came up with probably one of its more ridiculous explanations, and swears by it as much, or more than, any true believer in religion swears to the existence of God. It claims that the neurons it does measure in the cut-up brain form patterns of reality from our senses and those patterns light up so we can picture reality when we close our eyes.
In the face of the obvious, that if this were the explanation for our minds, none of us would see reality like any other does. In spite of our filtering reality through our own recall, we are able to draw a picture of something, and that picture will be the same as the pictures drawn by others. If the mind was nothing more than a Christmas tree, we wouldn't be able to create pictures of reality that didn't exist in reality because, with all the pictures locked away in neuronic connections, there'd be no way to connect different pictures to create something new. The biggest indictment, amounting to a conviction, of the absurd notion of activated neurons is, it doesn't produce the "I" that makes the decision whether or not to jump in the deep end of the pool.
Empirical science's explanation for the mind is not only intuitively wrong, it doesn't do what any answer to a question of reality is supposed to do, explain reality, but then, neither does its explanation for gravity, orbiting and rotation, light, you name it.
The primary question empirical science ignores, of course, is how the "I" that is our consciousness, the "I" that makes our choices, the "I" that has emotions, the "I" that directs our actions, is derived. After starting this column, it looks like I'll have to limit it to what the mind is, and follow up with a column, how it works with the brain, in order to do the subject complete justice. So this column will be limited to explaining how a structure could evolve that could differentiate the different intensities of light obtained by the eye and how that structure works to do so.
The starting point for any explanation for reality starts with the elementary particle I hypothesize as being responsible for light, matter and life (column 17-05). This particle has two opposing properties, one of attraction, which empirical science places in both the electron, the particle actually responsible for electricity, and the proton, a made-up particle empirical science devised to put in the nuclei of atoms to keep the electrons orbiting the atom in orbit (although not explaining where they derive their motion from). This model was created with the slavish analogy to magnets that empirical science created to explain the motion of electricity, with the opposites attract and likes repel concept dummied up to explain the movement of electricity in a circuit when a circuit has no positive and negative point. The creators of the proton totally overlooked the empirical dogma about likes repelling, putting protons in the nucleus that couldn't, according to empirical science, possibly stay together. This, in turn, required ingenious empiricists to create the strong force, a made-up force to hold the made-up protons together because of the made-up notion that protons are positive and electrons are negative, a notion applied to electricity from the very real world of magnets, where physical opposites do repel. All this malarkey resulted in Quantum Mechanics, which is today styled Quantum Science.
The attraction in my hypothesized elementary particle (and the only reason to hypothesize something is to see how it explains reality) is the electron's attraction, and I actually call the particle an electron. The only difference with my electron and empirical science's electron is, my electron also has the property of motion, a property empirical science, out of a desire to simply name things, but also out of its total ignorance resulting from determining what light was before it determined how it was produced, puts in the newly made-up photon, made up to explain Einstein's photoelectric effect. By putting both properties, motion and attraction, in the same particle, I can explain everything empirical science attempts to explain, and many more things it simply doesn't try to explain.
The electron with opposing properties can only form into three structures. When it is not in one of these structures, it is randomly moving between the changing potential differences in the environment. In that form, they are essentially moving as electricity, although the movement of electrons in conductors is controlled by engineers, or simply by any of us turning on a light switch. The movement of electrons is not a structure, so it is not included in the three possible structures.
The first structure that the electron can form is a unit of electrons. The force of attraction has to overcome the force of motion, the tendency to move at the speed of light. This is the opposite of field replacement (column 08-05) and is described in detail in the columns on the atom, 18 and 19-05. Because the use of one force to overcome another force uses up the force doing the overcoming, only a specific number of electrons can be attracted into these units, which then form into the nuclei of atoms. Because all electrons have the same amount of opposing forces, each unit requires a specific amount of that force to overcome the opposing force of motion, and therefore each unit contains precisely the same amount of electrons. And, because the attractive force of those electrons is overcoming their force of motion, the unit has the potential to produce quite a bit for motion if the force of its electron's motion overcomes their force of attraction. This is the potential energy that matter has, its potential to produce heat and light.
The next structure the electron with opposing forces can create is electromagnetic emissions. This is the expanding spheres of light that eventually let us see the hard edges of reality and they are described in detail in column 02-05, What is Gravity? The primary element of this structure is easily measurable in the laboratory. It is inductance. A flow of electrons produces an inductive flow of electrons. An inductive flow of electrons is individual electrons orbiting the flow at right angles. The flow attracts orbiting electrons because at any point in the flow there is an electron, and that electron has excess potential that can attract randomly moving electrons in the environment. These electrons orbit the flow at right angles because that is the shortest path available to satisfy the excess potential of the flow, and many, many electrons are attracted. When the inductive flow is established, it satisfies the excess potential of the primary flow. If the primary flow is increased, the inductive flow increases proportionally.
This latter fact is the secret of how the mind works, because the third structure the electron with opposing properties of motion and attraction can form is one in which the electrons are held into a web of stable equilibrium, the sort of structure empirical science uses to explain the physical nature of matter. In this structure, the electrons are evenly spaced from one another. They are held in position because they are attracting and repelling the electrons around it and, as a result, are able to go nowhere. Picture a cube and then stack a billion cubes together. At each intersection, there is an electron, and each electron is attracted to the electrons in all directions that are in turn attracted to it. However, each electron is attempting to regain its motion, as are all the electrons in all directions that are also attempting to regain theirs. As a result, none of the electrons move at all, and therefore, they are held by their opposing forces into a web of stable equilibrium.
Going back to How We See What We See, each of the flows of electrons bouncing off the hard edges of reality have a different intensity. Another way of saying this is, each flow is different in strength from all the other flows. The eye discriminates these differences in order to produce an accurate picture of reality so the mind will be able to reconstruct, on a relative basis by comparing each flow against the others, all distances and therefore reconstruct a picture of reality. The information in the flows also contains information about frequency, and this information also can be reconstructed as relative colors, but I want to keep the discussion simple.
Going back to induction, flows of electrons induce secondary flows in proportion to the strength of the flows. Moving this knowledge to the structure created to represent the mind, the structure has to be capable of discriminating among the various strengths of flows in order to reconstruct reality. Let's send a single flow through this structure, a structure in a state of stable equilibrium containing untold billions of electrons. What would happen? The flow would disbalance the electrons in the structure as it passed through. As long as it remained in the structure, the electrons near it would be disbalanced. This occurs because the electrons are attempting to satisfy the excess potential of the flow. The only electrons available to satisfy this excess potential are the electrons locked into the structure. The flow is not strong enough to dislodge the electron from the structure, but it is strong enough to move it out of position.
Let's add a second flow to the first, doubling its strength. The flow's excess potential is now twice as great as the first flows and its effect twice as great on the electrons near it when it passes through the structure. The electrons move just a little bit further out of position. Just as the size of the inductive flows match the primary flows of electrons, the disbalance of the electrons in the structure that is the mind are disbalanced in proportion to the flows passing through it. Thus, the electron, with its opposing properties, explains not only how we see what we see, but it explains how a structure could form that could discriminate from the relative differences in the strengths of the flows that allows us to know the relative distances of the hard edges of reality.
Of course, the movement of the electrons out of their positions of stable equilibrium in response to flows from reality will not be like putting a painting of that reality on canvas. It is an objective picture, a distortion of the structure that has no inherent meaning in and off itself. We will get to how we obtain meaning, understanding, in the next article. But as we go through our day, the electrons making up our mind are constantly moving into positions of disbalance in order to form the pictures of reality we need if we simply want to move from one place to another in that reality, and that, of course, is why the mind evolved, to allow us to move safely in reality.
As the day goes on, and the constant disbalance continues, the mind becomes less and less capable of forming an accurate picture of reality. That's why it has to shut out the world for a spell, so it can regain its equilibrium. That's why we sleep. And while it's regaining its equilibrium, it's producing random flows. Just as flows create inductances, inductances create flows, as is apparent in the alternating current generators that light up our world. These random flows produce images we see as dreams, the mechanism for which will be described in the next column, How the Mind Works.
Finally, to conclude What is the Mind, we have to readdress the question why it can't be detected. The only thing that can detect the mind is a flow of electrons. We detect it all the time. We are awake and conscious of our surroundings. Empirical science detects it all the time. It used to routinely send electricity through it to paralyze its electrons, fuse some together and eliminate others. It's called electroshock therapy and they don't use it enough on themselves.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com