One of the hallmarks of history of science books is the tone they take with respect to religion. Their authors, when dealing with the emergence of a science attempting to explain actual reality, can't help looking down their noses at the mindset that prevailed pretty much up to the 19th Century, a mindset that was slowly defeated throughout the 19th Century principally through the use of species evolution.
I've said before, and I'll say it now, this attitude is more than justified. When I read scientific treatises by writers immersed in Usher's biblical timeframe, it is horribly distracting to have events dated from a specific point, the creation that occurred some 6,000 years before. Even though some of the observations are more than valid, the use of a bogus dating system constantly intervenes and, in fact, discredits otherwise observations.
And that's the problem I find with history of science writings. The writers throw the baby out with the bath water, and that's pretty much what empirical science has done with its founding principles. For example, when evidence for a worldwide flood began to pour in with the great explorations of the 18th Century, the analysis of that evidence could not be credited to a flood, not because it was difficult to determine where the flood waters might have come from, but simply because the bible carried an account of a worldwide flood.
To accept the debris piled up around the world, debris that clearly resulted from a flood, as debris from a flood would be to credit the bible as factual. It made no difference that the creation story was clearly a story and the flood story, in the light of other stories existing around the world, was more in the nature of a myth or a recounting of an actual event. Under no circumstances could the emerging science credit the bible with any credibility whatsoever, so it had to come up with an alternate scenario. It created the story of the ice ages. It made no difference that there was less basis for ice to suddenly form and climb up hills than there was for the possible source of the floodwaters. It makes no difference today that empirical science can't explain how the ice ages might occur. Because it did occur in the empirical mind, any proposed mechanism, from dust clouds in space to drifting black holes, is empirical.
The question of the existence of the mind, argued throughout the 19th Century that was hosting the battle between religion and evolution, suffered a similar fate. The bible deals with the insubstantial soul. When empirical science sliced and diced the brain, it could not find a mind in the pulp of bloody gray matter. Without any evidence of a mind, it might have said, well, let's set forth what the purpose of the mind might be and then lets set forth how evolution might have created a structure to carry out that purpose.
Instead of doing the scientific thing, in the sense of science as a search into the nature of reality, it based its empirical conclusion on its anti-religious stance, that there can be no insubstantial mind because it would imply the existence of the religious soul and there is no empirical evidence for a soul. Forget the fact that there might well be an operating mind constructed in such a way that escapes detection with our detectors. Forget the fact that empirical science has gone on to create all sorts of fantasies, from black holes to quarks, and when, by international agreement no other particles could be created, colored quarks and charmed quarks, providing existing particles with physical and emotional properties to allow the number of particles fantasized to continue to multiply.
With no empirical investigation other than some slicing and dicing at a time when empirical science was unaware of the existence of atoms, let alone electrons, it made the philosophical determination based on its distaste for the biblical soul, that there was no mind, in the words of Bleep, that there was no there in there. And, knowing that empirical science is a one-way slide to total ignorance and extinction, once it concluded there was no mind, subsequent discoveries could never alter that conclusion.
In search of the mind, we first have to ask ourselves, what is the purpose of the mind?
Empirical science has yet to come up with a definition of the life which is the subject of their species evolution theories, but we can divide matter into two categories, inanimate matter, stuff that is made out of atoms, and animate matter, stuff that consists of inanimate matter organized around electrical flows. Animate matter can also be divided into two categories. Animate matter can be like flowers and trees, nonambulatory, or it can be like the foxes and us, ambulatory, capable of moving within the environment.
If animate matter is nonambulatory, then it just sits there mediating current flows. Flowers spring open in the morning when the sun comes up and causes the atoms that make up the earth to lose their electrons which stream into an atmosphere that contains a deficit of electrons. Trees stretch their branches to the sun to provide the shortest paths for the electrons to flow. However, to exist, nonambulatory matter does not have to know anything about its environment. It is only when animate matter begins to move that it needs some way to detect the environment so that it can move with purpose within the environment, purpose of course being primarily to obtain the food that will allow it to remain animated.
While animate matter needs a detector to espy nourishment in the environment, the detector serves a far more important function. Animate matter could detect all the nourishment it needed in the environment but if it couldn't acquire that nourishment without the environment eliminating it, then the detector would be of no use. Animate matter has to be able to get from one place in the environment to another without falling off cliffs, running into inanimate matter, or becoming nourishment for other animate matter. The detector not only has to notify the animate matter that there is food, it has to warn animate matter if there are pitfalls in the environment.
The senses are the way animate matter gathers information about the environment, with sight being the primary method. We will return specifically to sight when we ask, what type of structure could detect the environment? For now we can ask, what elements have to be present for animate matter to move safely in the environment.
First, animate matter has to have a way to collect information about the environment.
Second, animate matter has to have a way to store that information.
Third, animate matter has to have a way to recall that information.
Finally, animate matter has to have a way to compare the recalled information with the current information that it is collecting from the environment.
To summarize the process, animate matter needs a structure in which to compare the pictures of reality it is receiving from its senses with the pictures of reality it has stored and can recall to compare with the pictures of reality received from its senses.
That place is the mind. To deny that the mind compares reality with recall is simply absurd. To claim that this comparison process occurs when the neurons, programmed with experience, light up when the experience is reduplicated in reality, is equally absurd. We have a place to compare simply because we can take a picture of reality, hold it in our mind, then use our recall to alter that picture so that it does not reflect reality. We can then take that altered picture and test it against reality to see if it works. This is how we engineer our technology. The silly notion that neurons light up in chains to reflect reality explains neither how we rearrange reality to create new realities, or more importantly, how we create alternate realities and then chose between those realities. Where is the new information coming from if we as animate matter are limited by the neuronic connections imposed by reality, and who is making the choice?
In short, by denying the existence of a structure in which experience can be compared with reality, empirical science is simply denying that we, the I that is unique to each of us, exists. There doesn't have to be a soul, there doesn't have to be anything ethereal or metaphysical. There simply has to be a physical structure in which experience can be compared with reality.
The one thing we know about that physical structure, other than the fact that it has to exist, is that it is not detectable. The next task is to analyze its requirements and then look into the natural world to see if there is something that would produce a structure that fits the requirements.
The first question we have to ask about the requirements, and this is a question that empirical science studiously avoids addressing with its simplistic neuronic lightshow explanation, is how does the out there get inside. In How the Body Really Works, I use the example of a basketball player shooting a hoop. The hoop is out of direct physical reach of the player, yet he can form an accurate enough picture of its location with respect to his body that he can use his muscles to sink a basket. A dog can chase after a thrown Frisbee and judge exactly when to use its muscles to leap into the air and intersect the Frisbee's path.
We take these are extraordinary occurrences for granted. However granted we take them, and however extraordinary they are, empirical science simply doesn't bother asking how it's possible for our brains to accurately measure the physical reality it can't physically touch. Instead, it takes its normal course when confronted with something its hotch potch of notions don't explain. It creates a myth, used frequently in Bleep, that our minds process millions of events, but we are only conscious of a couple of thousand of them.
In reality, our minds perform their evolved function of detecting and warning, nothing more, although many times through our willful ignorance and our ability to see the recall we create in place of the reality that exists, much less.
To understand how the dimensions of external reality get into our minds, and I am going to use the M word for the structure we are seeking, we have to ask ourselves, how is it that we see external reality to start with? The obvious answer is, we see external reality because of light. The next question we have to ask is, what is unique about light that would allow that light to provide our minds with the dimensions of external reality?
To answer this last question, we have to reference a fact empirical science likes to ignore, that because light expands uniformly, it diminishes with distance. Empirical science likes to ignore this fact because its queen of sciences, astronomy, claims that it can see the light from the stars at the end of the universe and therefore can see the beginning of time. But we can simply ignore this balderdash in favor of the simple measurable fact that light diminishes with the square of the distance it travels, or mathematically, the areas of spheres are related by the squares of their radii, and thus the light that uniformly covers the sphere diminishes with the square of the distance because the surface of the sphere over which the light expands increases with the square of its radius.
If light diminishes uniformly, then there must be a mechanism that controls the rate at which it diminishes (see column 02-05, What is Gravity?) but more to the point, light must travel in streams, flows of elementary particles which subdivide as the light expands over the surface of what can be visualized as an expanding sphere.
However we visualize the light, if we know the distance to its source and the amount of light coming from the source, we know how much light there is at any particular distance from the source so long as it hasn't expanded out of existence. We also know one other thing. We know that light bounces off objects and when it does so, it once again begins to expand. If we are in a room that is lit by sunlight, we don't know how far the light has traveled before it entered the room, but we know that the same light is bouncing off every surface in the room, what I refer to as the hard edges of reality. While we don't know how much light is bouncing off any one point, we do know that the light bouncing off each point is re-expanding.
As we stand in a room, the light from every hard edge is re-expanding and it provides information about how much it has diminished, not in absolute terms, but in terms relative to all the other flows of light our eyes are collecting. Our eyes are capable of differentiating the strength of the flows of light bouncing off the different hard edges of reality simply by comparing the amount of light that is coming from each of those hard edges. We can locate those hard edges simply by comparing the strength of the flows. Of course, there are ways to trick our eyes with technology, but our eyes evolved to differentiate the flows bouncing off the reality through which we wish to move, and those flows all have a uniform source, the sun.
The image of reality our eyes collect from the light bouncing off the hard edges of reality next have to be transported inside our skulls. This clearly occurs up the optic nerve, but the basic question we have to ask here is, do the flows travel up the optic nerve or are the flows encoded in something similar to a gene, a record of what we have recorded that can then be decoded in the mind? The answer to this question does not involve the structure of the mind, but the operation of recall. If we can store the pictures of reality that we form, then there has to have evolved something similar to a gene, only with the ability to store the electrical impulses that code the pictures of reality that we see and which can be stored and subsequently recalled, decoded and compared with the reality that we are seeing.
The search for the structure of the mind, however, involves asking the question, if the dimensions of reality are collected as a result of the relative strength of the flows of light bouncing off that reality, then what kind of structure could evolve that would be able to differentiate the flows once they were decoded?
Columns 17, 18 and 19-05 describe the elementary particle and the atom I construct with that elementary particle. Once we hypothesize a single elementary particle with two properties and use it to unify light and electricity (column 08-05, Field Replacement), we can ask ourselves, what structures could that particle produce? It could produce the unit that makes up the nuclei of atoms and it could produce the expanding electromagnetic emission field, part of which we see as the balanced structure of light. There is one other structure that it could produce, and that is where we find the structure that is the mind.
Using the single elementary particle with its opposing properties of at rest motion and affinity propensity, the particles theoretically could be chemically placed into positions with respect to one another so that their opposing forces would lock them into a web of stable equilibrium, the hazy statement empirical science uses to describe how atoms form into matter. Picture a cube containing thousands of equally spaced elementary particles. When one particle attempts to exercise its at rest motion and move, the affinity propensities of the contiguous particles keep it in place. Once the particles reach a state of equilibrium, it would be very difficult for one of the two properties to overcome the other. It is the logical result of a particle with opposing properties. The opposing properties produce matter when the affinity propensity is dominant, the structure of light when the at rest motion is dominant, and the structure of the mind when both are equally balanced in a web of stable equilibrium.
How would such a structure respond to the information that we now know is contained in the flows of light bouncing off the hard edges of reality?
We saw with field replacement if we placed a single flow of electrons next to the cloud of electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom that the presence of a single electron in the flow at any one time would replace a less stable orbiting electron and that electron would fly off. If we double the flow, then two electrons would fly off. If we triple the flow, then three electrons would fly off.
In other words, the replacement of orbiting electrons is proportional to the strength of the flow.
What would happen to the structure of elementary particles held into a web of stable equilibrium if a single flow of electrons were passed through it? While the elementary particles, and they are electrons, as are the particles making up the flows of light, as the electrons that make up the mind will not fly off because they are held in place, they will move. As with field replacement, which this operation is a form of, the extent that the electrons that make up the mind move is proportional to the strength of the flows.
Thus, we have reality, which we can picture from the information contained in the relative flows of light bouncing off that reality, and we have a structure that evolved as a detector, our minds, that is affected precisely in proportion to the strength of the flows bouncing off of reality.
The reason we ourselves cannot detect this detector is that it is made up of the very electrons that we would use to detect it. It's purpose is to decode the relative strength of the flows of light in our environment and therefore any device we could possible conceive of to detect it would be no smaller than what it was attempting to detect and would thus fail to detect.
Of course, the very fact that we can detect reality makes reality the detector of the mind!
This detector, of course, is objective. It has no idea what it is detecting. When pictures of reality are reconstructed in it, the pictures have no meaning. It is only when similar pictures are recalled and brought into the detector for comparison that we obtain an understanding. This process involves the measurable electrical currents in the brain. As each picture is made up of a unique combination of electrical flows, each picture encoded into a memory unit has a unique electrical charge. The encoded memory units are stored in the neurons. The neurons have multiple connections because when a picture is formed in the mind, it generates a unique current that searches through the neuronic storage bins for memory units that are similar to the charge.
Memory units with similar charges are recalled and brought into the detector where they are decoded and the resulting flows passed through the detector. If the comparison works, if recall matches reality, then we understand reality. If it doesn't, then, with no comparison, the detector stops functioning and the flows operating the complex, with nowhere to go, enter the subsystems of the body, alerting the animate matter that something is wrong. That's how we are alerted to an onrushing car or a deadly cliff. We are recalling the experience we have without the cliff or the car and all of a sudden, reality doesn't match our recall.
The mind, like the mechanism for gravity, the mechanism that regulates the uniform expansion of light, the mechanism that causes the planet to rotate and the mechanism that causes planets to orbit, the physical description of the structure of light, of electricity and of magnetism, these things are items that exist in reality for which we can never produce a picture that can be stored in our minds.
As a result, we have to look at reality, we have to gather all of the facts about reality, and then we have to manufacture recall that attempts to reflect that reality. We can test our recall by altering reality in order to see if the recall is valid.
However, if we never address the questions, if we say the mind, like light doesn't exist, that gravity is a property like color and hardness, that the planets rotate and orbit because of out-of-reach historical forces, we do not have any recall to test and as a result, we will never know the true nature of reality. We will live on in our recall, our fantasy, while the world around us grows cold and dies.
And we will die with it.
We won't be asking: What the Bleep? We'll be bleeped!
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