The Physics Of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind And The Meaning Of Life by Evan Harris Walker

Author:Evan Harris Walker [Walker, Evan Harris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-12-07T15:56:00+00:00

-T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Our goal is to discover the ultimate nature of reality. But in that search, we are still looking for bedrock. We are still looking for that secure place to stand so that we can find truth and know reality. We have passed by the flickering lights that long ago cast primitive creeds into the minds of ancient man, and we have paused, watching science categorize the world into charts and parts-slices of objective reality that almost work. We have plumbed the depths of reality's finest particles and looked into the eye of the quantum world's observer, searchingperhaps to find something of ourselves there-searching for the source of it all. And the search has led us here, trying to probe the stuff that our own minds are made of. We still have a long way to go, and, for good or ill, we must travel alone in our quest for the Emerald City beyond the conscious mind.

In the last chapter, we proposed two postulates about consciousness. These postulates are not restrictions on our thought, nor do they limit our ultimate un derstanding of consciousness. These postulates merely give us a starting point. If they are wrong, we will find out that they do not serve us well and they will be changed. But it is impossible to develop knowledge or a science about something without spelling out what we are dealing with. With these postulates, however, we now have a foothold. We do not wish to redo all of science, nor redefine the definitions of the physical world in order to blend consciousness into an imagined understanding of what matter is. We do not wish merely to absorb consciousness into some presupposed philosophical nonproblem. That would not give us factual knowledge, but only a substitute belief system. Instead, we intend to learn exactly what consciousness is and how it works. We have introduced consciousness as a new "element" of reality. We have "defined" it by pointing to what we mean by consciousness, and now we must find out where it fits in physically and find out how it works. That is all that is intended by the postulate that consciousness is nonphysical. If later we find that we can measure consciousness the way we would measure mass or time or some physical object's form, we will toss the postulate aside and replace it with whatever we have found to be more serviceable.

But quite apart from whether or not consciousness is distinct from the category of physical objects, we know that consciousness-our own stream of conscious events-does contain information about physical processes. Consciousness is affected by matter or by events in the physical world. So we must find out how contact is made between those events of the physical world and consciousness. More to the point, we must discover what goes on in the brainif that is mind's proper home-that is associated, item by item, one for one, with the occurrence of consciousness.

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