As we saw in the last column, the mind evolved to allow us to move from on place in reality to another place. We are ambulatory animate matter. We move purposely. We are not like amoeba, which can only propel themselves in response to temperature and have to take what nourishment they can from the environment they happen to find themselves in, We need to feed ourselves, and to do that, we have to have a picture of the reality we are in so we can move in that reality to get the food. The eye evolved to take advantage of the one thing in reality that contained information about that reality, the flows of light bouncing off the hard edges of reality, locating those hard edges on a relative basis. The mind, a particulate structure constructed by the chemical brain, evolved to interpret those flows.
But, being able to form representations of external reality is not, in and of itself, helpful. Something else has to be going on. And there is one overriding fact involved with moving in reality. It is not simply enough that we be capable of discerning reality so we can move from one place to another, we have to be able to move from one place to another safely. The mind has to have, built in to its operation, a feature that would provide a warning device about the dangers in reality. Otherwise, we would never survive. We'd be falling off cliffs, stumbling over trees, getting mired in swamps, becoming the food of other ambulatory animate matter in reality. How does an objective structure like the mind produce a warning that there is danger out there, a danger to the physical organism to which the mind is attached?
We'll start with how the out there gets in here, how the information received by the eyes gets into the mind. Then we'll move on to how the mind operates, how we store the pictures we form in the wet works of our brain and how we recall those pictures, leading to the primary basis of the mind's operation (and the rock upon which scientific categorization is based) comparison. Then, we'll finish with how the mind warns us of the dangers in reality. And, of course, being sentient ambulatory animate matter, we'll have to cover how the mind generates the "I" that makes the choices whether to jump the chasm, or go around it.
The eye has collected the information necessary to reconstruct the dimensions of reality, the mind has the ability to decode the information, so the question becomes, how does that information get into the wet works of the brain. It obviously travels up the optic nerves of the eyes, but does it travel in the form it's collected, as bundles of flows of light? There are only two choices. Either it travels this way, or it travels as an encoded meme, a memory unit. How could such a memory unit evolve? Other than to say electrical flows arrange atoms into formations that take advantage of the potential differences in the environment, a process I call characteristic evolution, I can be more specific by saying genes are basically memory units containing the blueprint for all the characteristics that make up the animate matter they have to reconstruct. The amount of information contained in a gene is vastly greater than that needed in a memory unit. In the memory unit, we're talking about perhaps three or four thousand pieces of information, each bit relating to the strength of a flow and its frequency. This contrasts with the billions of pieces of information contained in the gene.
The answer to the question, flow or memory unit, has to be answered, however, in conjunction with how the mind operates. We know the outside world gets inside in some way, and we know one other thing. Once it gets inside, it is somehow stored. The mind would be incapable of storing flows because many of the pictures we form contain flows of the same strength and even frequency, watching a sunset for instance. Therefore, the fact that once we form a picture in our mind, we can forget it and later reform it, demonstrates that memory units are formed by the mind. Nature is efficient. It doesn't evolve two different ways to do the same thing. Because the mind has to generate recallable memory units, the eye must be capable of forming them.
How does the mind create them? We appear to form a picture in our mind at the rate of about 30 a second, or approximately what it takes to make videos seem real. The individual electrons in the mind are disbalanced at the rate of 30 times a second. In between the time it's disbalanced, and the next picture disbalances it, the electrons return to their positions of stable equilibrium, if the mind is fresh. Just as primary flows produce secondary flows, secondary flows produce primary flows. When the electrons move back into their positions of stable equilibrium, they regenerate flows representing the image they have just formed, and that image is encoded in a memory unit. It's the same process that goes on in the eye to encode the original memory unit of reality. We will see, however, that it is not exactly the same as reality, because the mind operates on the basis of comparison.
So the basic operation of the mind is to receive decoded memory units and provide information to encode memory units to store in recall. These memory units contain information that is objective, but has no meaning. How do they get meaning? The memory units created from the mind's flows are stored in the neurons. The neurons make up the bulk of the wet works of the brain. Multiple paths connect them. These allow rapid access to the memory units stored in them because the multiple connections allow many paths for the current to search through the neuronic maze. They have to be stored simply because without them, the mind would be useless, and animate matter would never advance beyond random motion. The reason they have to be recalled is that the mind needs something to compare with the objective pictures it's forming. If the mind has no way of comparing the objective pictures it forms, then it has no understanding. The purpose of the mind is to move in reality, and moving in reality requires a picture of that reality to move in. The picture of the reality we move in is a new reality, but it would be senseless to us if we didn't have a picture of it in recall to compare it with. When we haven't been through a path in the woods, we move very gingerly. We have recall of ground, trees, logs, all sorts of things, but if are unfamiliar with the path, we have to be constantly alert. However, if we've taken the path many times before, we can walk it while thinking about something else.
When the mind forms reality, it calls forth a memory unit to match with that reality. If the two match, then we understand the reality we are in. If we don't, then we are perplexed. We don't understand, and we have to stop and figure out what we are seeing. When we see something new, we have to build a storehouse of pictures dealing with it in order to begin comprehending what we're looking at. The question is, how are the same pictures of reality the mind is forming summoned from among the billions of pictures stored in the neuronic storage bins?
This is probably the neatest part of the mind's operation, well, other than it produces a conscious "I" and warns us about potential dangers. The sum total of the flows' strength represents an overall current level. The level current the wet works of our brains operate at is constantly changing because the flows from reality, including, by the way, flows from our other senses, is constantly altering. If we see an attractive person walking down the street, we'll have one level of current flows, if that person approaches us, we'll get an entirely different level, one of anticipation or perhaps fear. The pictures we form in our minds are stored at the unique current level that existed when we formed the pictures. Thus, when we see a tree on a balmy day, we store the memory unit of it at the specific current level created by the picture we see. The next time we see a tree, we will recall a tree because we are generating the same current level that we generated when we stored the picture of the tree. We might have to alter the current level a little to access the memory unit of the tree, and the pictures might contain disjointed elements that require more effort at recall, but the electricity coursing throughout the wet works of our brains is attempting to pick up memory units that will duplicate the picture we have formed in our minds.
The mind, therefore, has two inputs and one output. The first of the two inputs is from reality, the second is from recall, and the output is reality modified by our recall. That's why we all end up seeing things differently, even though we are seeing things approximately the same way. The disbalance of the electrons caused by flows representing reality are slightly altered by accommodating the recalled picture of reality, which is never the same as reality, and is also influenced by our opinions about reality. How can a mind be disbalanced by opinions? First, let's address the question of how the mind generates the conscious "I" that is us.
The mind forms about 30 pictures a second. Those pictures can be about anything we've experienced, or even things we've imaged. The way we created imagined experiences is to close out reality and begin to form pictures from recall dealing with the experiences we want to imagine. Just because we don't' have a tree in front of us doesn't mean we can't generate the current necessary to form a picture of a tree. We can, to a great deal, control the electrical level in our mind, as recent innovations in computer control have shown, with people who can't use a keyboard using their mind to move a cursor on the screen. So we have a real mix in our neuronic storage bins. We have static pictures of reality, pictures that we formed just as we saw them, we have altered pictures of reality, pictures that were stored of reality after our recall has changed them, and we have pictures that have nothing to do with reality. And all of those pictures are diverse, the older we get the more diverse they get (until we get so old, we can't generate the proper currents to recall, and then we can't remember beans).
What do all the pictures we recall have in common? An element of every picture we form is our physical and mental self. Each and every picture of reality we recall has one element in common, the "I" that formed the picture. No matter how diverse the pictures are, they always contain a picture of our "I" and that picture is being formed at the rate of about 30 times a second. This common element becomes our conscious self as we start to collect experiences of the world. This is the "I" that makes our decisions, and those decisions are made on a combination of experience and genetics, and this gets us to the feature of the mind that allows it to warn us if there are dangers in realty, and also do a heck of a lot more than evolution might have contemplated.
The mechanism the mind evolved to notify us of dangers in reality is quite simple, but very elusive. We have only one mind, and to move smoothly through reality, it has to form two pictures at the same time, one from reality, the other from recall. If the pictures agree, the mind has no conflict. It is when the two pictures don't agree that the mind has problems. Because we can't move in reality without forming a picture of the reality want to move in, try moving in pitch-blackness, pictures of reality set up a recall process that precedes forming pictures from reality. We have experiences with reality and therefore we have expectations about reality. If we have trod the trail many times, we have a picture of the trail in our recall, and once we embark upon the trail, our recall takes over and guides us along, letting us think about the moon, or what we're having for dinner. However, if something about the trail has changed since our last journey, say the hill has washed away leaving a chasm where the trail once was, then the picture of reality, no trail, will conflict with the picture from recall, a trail, and with the pictures being different, the mind can't form both at the same time. What does it do? It stops functioning while it takes in reality. In the process, because we are no longer forming a picture of ourselves moving in reality, we stop moving until we can figure out what has changed in reality. Our minds have prevented us from falling into the chasm. Try explaining how that happens with empirical science's ditzy Christmas tree explanation for the mind, the neurons light up and connect to form pictures.
When the mind is confronted with two contradictory pictures, it simply cannot work. It, however, does more than stop, stopping us. The electricity operating it, no longer in use, has to go somewhere. It goes into the body. That's why when we step off a curb, expecting the road to be clear, and suddenly find ourselves in mortal danger from an oncoming truck, we have a physical reaction. Reactions to disagreements between recall and reality can range from rapid breathing, increased heart rate, to dizziness, loose bowels, you name the physical condition, it could occur.
One of the most common physical conditions that occur is rage. We always have a picture of our "I" in our mind, and because acting in reality is positive, we need a positive picture of our "I" to act in reality. If someone steps in front of us in line, he's producing a picture of a negative "I" and that picture conflicts with the positive picture. We might just lash out and hit him. It's why arguments escalate into fights and worse. Insults are directed against the positive nature of the opponent's "I" and the greater the disagreement, the greater the rage.
Problems really begin for the operation of the mind when it comes to those things in reality that are not apparent, the things I cover in these columns and for which I wrote the Copernican Series. When there is nothing in reality to put into the mind, the mind has to create recall to match it. If we didn't create recall to match reality, then we would be uncomfortable because, while not having recall to match reality is not as physically discomforting as an outright disagreement, it is still discomforting. When we see an object drop, we can't form a picture of what's making it drop. We don't have that in our recall. We feel uncomfortable until we have something in recall to explain reality. Thus, we believe anything, stupid statements like objects fall because the Earth is at the center of the universe and everything falls toward the center, or the more recent equally stupid statement, objects fall because it is a property of them to fall (gravity is a property of mass). It doesn't much matter what we put in our recall to answer the question, just so we don't feel uncomfortable with the recall. Objects fall because they rise clearly wouldn't work because it would create opposing pictures, objects don't rise.
The recall we create for common things like falling objects is almost as prevalent in the pictures of reality that we form as the picture of our "I" because we are constantly faced with gravity. Thus, when I come along and say, objects fall not because of a property of matter, but because of the mechanical result of what matter is doing, cooling (see column 20-25), I create a conflict similar to the conflict set up when someone belittles our "I" and enrages us. No one, let alone an empiricist, is going to put up with someone that belittles them, even though no one is belittling anyone (well, I never used to, but I've seen so much stupidity, I can't help myself), we're just dealing with ideas. The problem is, empiricists don't deal with ideas, they deal with dogma.
At this point, we are in danger of our mind doing us in. We are stuck with a system that creates facts out of ideas. The general public believes those facts to be reality. The resulting belief system feeds one heck of a lot of people who aren't about to alter their beliefs, because it would admit being wrong. Admitting being wrong is a personal blow to the positive feature of the "I" and results in discomfort, many times outright rage. Science claims to be self-correcting, but empirical science is not self-correcting because it has turned ideas into laws that can't be contravened.
Thus, we're pretty much doomed to ignorance. Nor do we have a lot of time to go through the violent reappraisal of a Copernican revolution. For one thing, Copernicus was dealing with a measurable fact. I'm dealing with concepts that explain facts. But more to the point, we don't have a million years left. The Earth is sitting in cold, dark, empty space. It's losing heat every day. Growing seasons will become shorter, the sea level will rise as gravity lessens and decompresses it, and pretty soon, we'll be at each other's throats for food, for survival. It's not a pleasant future. But the empiricists will always be at the top of the food chain as they march us lemmings off the cliff into oblivion. The only consolation is that they'll be right there with us.
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