What is the human mind?

We tend to say ''us'' or ''me''... or the proverbial ''I'' - where is ''us'', ''me'' or ''I''?

Dr. F. A. Wolf, PhD, says that we can look into a mirror, but the body we see really isn't us... it's still a corpus reflectus. In effect, he see's our being - our very reflection as being a type of field... much like the type of field you will find around a photon.

The idea is genious. Consciousness and self ''seep'' out of matter/energy... we are a field of being and awareness. Then, after so much time, the field weakens, and dissipates... this of course is death.

When we consider our ''field'', we tend to entangle every other aspect of our beings with it... such as emotions and thoughts. But how does seemingly small peices of matter group together to form complex thoughts and group emotions? It is much like the equations describing a wave... it will travel at superluminal speeds unless found to be within a group velocity... and much like the matter we are composed of, ''group'' so that something unique can happen.

In my studies of cognition, i have decided that the the mind is almost certainly a dimension... an imaginary dimension inextricably linked onto the vectors of spacetime:

a² + b² + c² + di²

This can be seen a number of ways... whilst some physicists like to see this imaginary vector as being a product of one imaginal sea of thoughts and emotions, there is still the question of how two minds are independant of each other. Physicist Ludvic Bass once said that there was no independant mind, and that individuality was something of an illusion.
I haven't yet made my own mind on this. I like the idea of there being the notion that each mind is its own dimension... There does seem however many ways to answer for the paranormal when more than one mind is linked into a spacetime aquarium.

What really interests me is memory. Energy in physics, unlike virtual particles, real particles contain real energy, and this energy between two particles cannot be transferred unless carried through angular momentum... we say that that two charged particles using the time variable (t=0) – which is the past variable – they can be shared through an interval of a mathematical calculus:

0<t<r/c

Energy is conserved through this process, and like all types of conservation, there may even be a transfer of information... a stored type of memory in the energy. In more advanced computers, scientists have been using entangled particles to transfer information much quicker:

(1/sqrt(2))(|01>-<10)

When one particle is determined, the other particles condition of spin is also instantaneously determined:

(x,y=½+x,y=-½=0)

Dr. Radin of the Noetic Institute has proclaimed that quantum entanglement could play a pivotal role in consciousness. One can only assume that he is also thinking of information, and more to the point, the memory of consciousness.

In a holographic memory device, a laser beam is split in two, and the two resulting beams interact in a crystal medium to store a holographic recreation of a page of data.
This is the up and coming product of everything, but the bioholograph is so much more different; whilst it shares the same principles.
Take the memory of the mechanical holograph in a system. Holographic memory offers the possibility of storing 1 terabyte (TB) of data in a sugar-cube-sized crystal. A terabyte of data equals 1,000 gigabytes, 1 million megabytes or 1 trillion bytes.

The reality we see, smell and touch are built up on senses. Thus, the optical bubble of perception isn't the real physical outside world. The world we see is actually a mental projection > one that is created through a series of complicated processes. Somehow, the eye captures a two-dimensional image and casts it into the three-dimensional phenomenon of perception, and how it does this, is still a mystery to neuroscientists.

When a photon (a particle of light) hits off the retina, changes occur inside of the cells. A molecule called the Cis-Retinal changes into a Trans-Retinal; it isn't a chemical change, but rather a change in the spatial structure of the molecule. This changes a protein that is already present in the cells of the retina, and this protein attaches itself to another protein, because of a chemical change in the original protein. More happens.

Molecules are cut in half, which in turn causes electrical channels to become closed off; and this series of events causes an electrical imbalance, which is then transported through electrolyte and nerve activity to the brain...

Much like the holographic memory, human memory can also be attrubuted to some type of holographic network, and i shall explore this with more detail later.

The problem with this language is that the word "field" doesn't really mean anything here. How does he distinguish "being" from "field", and if he offers no distinction, then how does substituting "field" for "being" advance our cause? It is not the suggestion of a field that says anything, it is the specified attributes of that field. So if it's "like what you find around a photon", can I use Maxwell's equations on it? If not, what have I gained by calling it a field? It's philosophy, where words are vague, not science, where words are specifically connected to measurables and equations.
The word "group" in group velocity does not necessarily have anything to do with a group or conglomerate of particles. A single quantum has a group velocity. Again I don't see the value in making analogies that do not preserve the specific meaning of the terms.
I also feel that identity is an illusion, but this is not really saying much. It is an extremely effective illusion around which much of our mind's architecture is built, and it's not clear a mind can function without that illusion. And if an illusion is perceived by a consciousness, does that not make it in some sense real? One must look very closely at what "illusion" means, often it means that something is perceived that cannot be interfaced with in any way other than that perception-- but see how that takes on a different flavor when one is talking about the perception of identity, which one would not be expected to be able to interface with with any means outside the perception of the individual. In other words, if I didn't experience individuality, even as an illusion, could I understand what you mean by the word well enough to test it? It may be an illusion that bootstraps itself into what we would call real.
Perhaps, but I don't know what he bases that on. I do know that a lot of baloney is written about entanglement-- but I don't say that he is part of that, there may well be important ways that intrinsically multiple-particle information storage (which is what entanglement is) might advance the sophistication of a mind. I wonder if he can distill his idea into a clear statement of how he thinks that occurs.
But is there any evidence that the human brain stores that much information? I'm asking, I really don't know the storage of a brain per suger cube, and it would be important to know that to help constrain the possible storage mechanisms. I don't even know if human memory is thought to be analog (like a hologram) or digital (like computer memory). Is that known?

Hi Ken.. i'll address your thoughts soon. But first i promised an extension:

The hologram of photographic technique was first derived by D. Gabor in 1947, and the hologram of consciousness was based upon this. The theory of holography was rediscovered in 1965 by workers at the University of Michigan, Leith and Upatnieks…

The technique worked by ‘interference of light,’ which is analogous to dropping two stones into a pool, and watching their wave patterns interfere with each other. If a wave peak is created, they make a point twice as high, but if they are lower, they will interfere, and the trough of one wave cancels out the peak of another.

Photons or particles of light also work in wave-like patterns. We knew this from the experiments of the Double-Slit Experiment conducted by Thomas Young. White light has a wavelength that can be corresponded to all the other several types of photonic wave patterns known… One being Red Light having a wave length of 7 x 10^-5 to Ultra-Violet at 4 x 10^-5… But these wave patterns are very, very small.

When we note something like 4 x 10^-5, we are using a scientific notation. They help us catalogue how small, or how large a number is. For instance, if you had a number that was 473, 000, 000, 000 large, you would calculate how many digits there are until one non-zero product was left, and that would be 11 digits… therego, we write 4.73 x 10^11.

What you need to do to create a hologram, is to take a beam of light, and make them split against a prism, and then bring the two beams back together using mirrors. This creates an interference pattern and a photographic plate would store the pattern. And viola! You have your hologram.

But what makes a hologram a holographic picture, is that the light becomes ‘’stored memory,’’ of how that thing is shaped up. This is how we can have the future-to-be devices that store up such memory and create a hollow image of some physical form from a plate. What is once more intriguing is that any entire image can be reproduced from any single portion of the plate… in other words, you can cut away at the plate, but no de-fragmentation eliminates the picture, but rather the clarity is distorted, and according to the creators of this, it then must obey its own Law of Mass Action.

The human eye is indeed amazing. It captures a two-dimensional image from the retina, and somehow processes it into the three-dimensional phenomena of the neural network. The mysterious configuration of the neural network can be in some form or another be answered for by the holographic network of such a system recently described. In the same way, it takes light, rearranges it in a two-dimensional plate, and re-configurates it into a three-dimensional phenomena which records the image before any transaction was made.

1. Indeed... can we actually apply fields of force equations to consciousness? Maybe, but they would differ quite a bit from what we know as Maxwells equations... We might find that the stress-energy tensors and whatnot, decribed by spacetime distortions could be used to answer how consciousness is unravelled. The leading idea right now is that quantum gravity has something to do with our cognition.

2. Yeh... grouping might have not been the best example. I agree.

3. Yes... I too feel something is wrong with the idea of independance, but we don't have that many mathematical models of the mind in existence, unfortunately.

4. Well, as far as the storage of information goes, quantum entanglement is cretainly a big hit right now.

5. Certainly no evidence it can store 'that much information...' however, there has been evidence that the spacetime vacuum can. Take the following for a quick refernce by Physicist Robert Neil Boyd:

''According to the Vedas and the Upanishads, matter is composed of infinitesimal particles called "bhutatmas" which are also the smallest units of Consciousness. In Kashmir Shaivism, which is based on the Vedas, matter is composed of “tattvas” which are units of consciousness and are also considered a type of energy. Furthermore there are many layers of consciousness in this system, where the most dense forms refer to matter. We have evidence that something like these infinitesimal particles, these “units of consciousness”, exist. The researches of Gariaev, Poponin, et.al. , show that the vacuum itself has a memory. The measurements done by this group indicate that the agency responsible for retaining this memory must be smaller than the Planck length, in other words, smaller than 10 e-33 cm across. In the paper describing their results, they describe coherent energetic entities called “solitons”, which are comprised of a loosely coupled coherent system of subquantum entities. This coherent solitonic system of loosely coupled entities can be viewed as a partial description of Consciousness. http://www.rialian.com/rnboyd/dna-wave.doc

Eminent neurophysiologist Karl Pribram proved that the memory of the human being is not localized in the brain at all. His experiments proved that the memory is distributed in space, not necessarily contiguous with the physical form, in a holograph-like manner. This means that there exist multitudinous copies of any memory object in the volume of the hologram.

The Pribram model of memory is like a hologram. When you cut a small piece out of a hologram and shine the proper light on it, a complete copy of the original hologram, albeit smaller, is observed. This understanding was completely at odds with the then prevailing views of consciousness, which had the view that memories resided at particular and exclusive locations within the physical brain. Due to this mistaken view, many experimenters subsequently made many attempts to disprove Pribram's results by means of cutting out various parts of the brains of laboratory rats which had been trained to run through mazes, thinking that if they cut out the correct part of the rat's brain, that it would lose its ability to negotiate the maze. Such results would support the old notions of localized memory. Attempts to disprove Pribram’s hypothesis by the method of cutting out and removing various brain segments all failed.

Later, some researchers did things like take the rats’ brains completely out and turn them sideways, upside-down, backwards, and all manner of directions. The rats which were treated in these barbaric manners never lost their ability to negotiate the maze. Later on, out of sheer frustration that Pribram's expressions might be right, one research team went so far as to remove the brain from a rat and put it through a blender. Then they poured the resulting liquidic slurry back into the poor rat's skull. When the rat awoke from the anesthetic, it effortlessly ran the maze, and otherwise went on about its business. These researchers thereby turned about to support the Bohm-Pribram holographic model of memory.

The results of Pribram indicate that the memory of the human being is a hologram-like system, which does not reside in the same volume as the brain. Pribram’s clinically derived results support Bohm’s notion of the universe as a hologram. Then we want to know, where is the medium in which this hologram can reside? Such a medium is described by Gariaev, Poponin, et.al. , in terms of solitons in a system of loosely coupled subquantum particles. What we see now, is the possibility of a hierarchical system of hologram-like solitons which reside in a medium of loosely coupled subquantum particles. This takes us back full circle to expressions regarding the “tattvas” and “bhutatmas” of the Vedic system.''

Calling it "leading" is a bit of an overstatement-- I tend to see it as the phenomenon that when there are two things we don't understand, like consciousness and quantum gravity, one can achieve an alluring parsimony of uncertainty by simply placing them in a box together.
You're going to need a citation with that one, it sounds preposterous. I could believe that they might have removed a part that was taking no part in that process, and whether or not they returned the "slurry" could not possibly affect the rat's capabilities in any way other than to give it a pretty significant infection problem. Indeed, avoiding strokes would seem tricky when you start cutting out parts of brains willy nilly.
But none of those models are terribly specific. Since we accept quantum mechanics as our most fundamental expression of the rules of reality, it's not much of a stretch to make anything come "full circle" to a description involving the behavior of some kind of particles under the action of some kind of field. Most would probably expect those particles to be electrons and the field to be electromagnetic-- how is that fundamentally distinguishable from "tattvas" or "bhutatmas", other than that the rules of electrons and their fields are much more specific? I think consciousness will require a different analysis to understand than the study of the action of the individual particles or their fields, it will be something that emerges from the action of particles only because it exists as something that can be projected onto that action, but not understood in terms of that action.

The closest I ever heard to the blender experiment, was that by feeding ground up planarian who had learned a maze to planarian who hadn't, the cannibalistic planarian ran faster times then untrained planarian who hadn't being fed trained planarian. I don't see this happening with a rat brain though. The circulatory system, which feeds the cells, would be severally, ravaged.
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=826389

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Indeed. This is Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff's idea of some (as yet unknown) quantum gravitational effects taking place in the microtubules of neurones, which allow some level of quantum indeterminacy to intrude into the macroscopic brain.
It's not particularly popular: in part because of the handwaving, in part because Penrose's argument for consciousness being non-computational is rather difficult to follow, and in part because it's anyway difficult to see how indeterminacy would allow consciousness to perform non-computational tasks (rather than just plain random tasks).

Indeed, again.
Preposterous because removing mammalian brains just kills mammals, and preposterous because of the idea that any rational researcher would "pour the slurry back into the head". Anything that could be demonstrated by such an experiment could be demonstrated by leaving the head empty of whatever had been removed.
It sounds like a cartoon of Lashley's experiments in the 1940s, when he removed large chunks of cerebral cortex from rats. He found that the location of the cortical injury had little effect on maze-learning, but that the extent of the injury did: larger injuries resulted in larger deficits. This led him to suggest that "engrams" were not stored at unique locations in the cortex.
Lashley wasn't aware that rats (and other animals) store much of their navigational memory in the hippocampus, so his findings are less surprising now than they were at the time.

Grant Hutchison

It doesn't seem to have happened with the planaria, either, as your link makes clear: McConell's experiments haven't turned out to be reproducible.

Grant Hutchison

Well if it ain't happening to flatworms, it ain't happening to rats. Frankly, I was rather repulsed anyone would even have the IDEA of doing such an experiment to rats. EWWW!!!
And for the record, I am in favor of animal testing. But that isn't testing, that's screwing around.

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Yes... it's not nice at all.

As for some link, i am affraid to appoint that i am taking Dr. Boyds word for it... I can't imagine for one second a renown scientist like himself would fake data... it's just so... unscientific.

Then ask him for the citation-- maybe something is getting "lost in translation" here.

I will in good time.

In the meantime, others may care to form a provisional opinion by browsing Robert Neil Boyd's website, or by googling up his contributions to the PhysOrg forum.

Grant Hutchison

I see no name other than "Rialian" on that website, but if that's a pen name for Boyd, then he seems to really think he's a magical elf. I suppose that sums up a "provisional opinion" right there.

Apologies.
Robert Neil Boyd's website is hosted within Rialian's. The correct link is:
http://www.rialian.com/rnboyd/

I've corrected the embedded link in my original post.


Boyd doesn't seem to think he is elf, but he certainly seems to believe in them:Grant Hutchison

Ken:
You might also be interested in the polymathic Dr Boyd's insight into Obvious Flaws in Relativistic Electrodynamics.

Grant Hutchison