Quantum Physics of Time:: Cosmology, Brain, Mind, and Time Travel by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cosmology Science Publishers
Published: 2015-10-24T21:00:00+00:00

2. The Theory of MindTime

King (2011) stated that “the evolutionary key to consciousness may lie in the survival advantage it could provide in anticipating threats and strategic opportunities.” King goes on to describe how these two characteristics of life—the motivation to avoid environmental threats and the motivation to approach opportunities—exist at all levels of life, from the eukaryote cell to human beings. Each form of life contains sense organs that are sensitive to feedback about its environment. However, over time, life evolved more intricate and complex methods of survival, including complex nervous systems, such as those associated with episodic and semantic memory systems, that allowed for increased capacity of information storage and processing (Liljenström, 2011), which in turn provided life forms the ability to, in varying degrees, (a) perceive the passage of time, (b) localize their awareness in time, and (c) engage in mental time travel (e.g., Corballis, 2013).

As Lombardo (2011) noted, consciousness is temporally based in that it is always opening into the future or looking backwards into the past. According to Lombardo, “conscious beings are aware of duration, relative stability, and patterns of change; of becoming and passing away; and of an experiential direction to time. The conscious now ... may be anchored at the level of perception, and contextualized within consciousness of the past (memories) and conscious anticipation of the future, all three phenomenologically blurring together at the edges.”

We propose that over the course of evolution, sensitivities toward perceiving potentially pleasurable/appetitive and aversive/harmful environmental stimuli and the motivation to approach and/or avoid such stimuli moved beyond reflexive, innate, and learned associative neural networks and became increasingly influenced by, and in turn influenced, the cognitive structures associated with organisms’ ability to perceive and conceptualize time.

Specifically, we propose that at the foundation of consciousness are three temporally- based, cognitive–perceptual, abstract–linguistic patterns of thinking, which we refer to as Past, Present, and Future thinking (see Fig. 1). These three thinking perspectives correspond with (a) innate representations of the past, present, and future as temporal realities; (b) the conceptual representations and concepts that emerge from those representations; and (c) how organisms, particularly human beings, localize themselves in time. Past, Present, and Future thinking form the foundation for understanding all of human perception, thought, and interaction, from the individual to the collective, and from the formation of an idea to the creation of cultures and artifacts based on those ideas. Past, Present, and Future thinking influence the personal (and collective) narratives that individuals (and groups) develop and how individuals (and collectives): (a) perceive the world around them; (b) process and then encode information in semantic and episodic memory; (c) mentally represent objects of consciousness; (d) formulate goals and intentions; (e) develop their preferences; and (f) communicate and interact with others.

At the level of the individual, we propose that the foundation of a personal identity (i.e., a me) and just about all stable trait-based individual differences, such as the personalities that individuals manifest, as well as individuals’ perceptions, intentions, values, beliefs, motivations, and behaviors can be understood as the interaction of individuals’ Past, Present, and Future thinking.

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