Evolution of love

MIND IS ONE

Consciousness poses the deepest problem for science, even as it resides as one of the key tenets of biocentrism. There is nothing more intimate than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. “All sorts of mental phenomena,” says consciousness researcher David Chalmers at the Australian National University, “have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given.” …
Many physicists claim that a “Theory of Everything” is hovering right around the corner. Yet they’ll readily admit they have no idea about how to elucidate what Paul Hoffman, the former publisher of Encyclopaedia Britannica, called “the greatest mystery of all”—the existence of consciousness. To whatever small incremental degree its secrets get revealed, however, the discipline that has and will continue to accomplish this is biology. Physics has tried in this area and has decided it is in over its head. It can furnish no answers. The problem for today’s science—as consciousness researchers are continually discovering—is finding hooks or hints, leads to follow, when all roads thus far lead only to neural architecture and what sections of the brain are responsible for what. Knowing which parts of the brain control smell, for example, is not helpful in uncovering the subjective experience of smell—why a wood fire has its telltale scent. It is, for current science, such an extremely frustrating pre- dicament that few bother taking any first steps. It must feel like the nature of the sun did to the ancient Greeks. Every day a ball of fire crosses the sky. How would one begin to ascertain its composition and nature? What possible steps could one take when the invention and principles of the spectroscope lay two millennia in the future?
“Let man,” declared Emerson, “then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind.” Clearly, it is not solely atoms and proteins that hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer. Our thoughts and perceptions have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience. Even taking cognition to the next step by fabricating a sense of meaning to things necessitates the creation of spatio-temporal relationships, the inner and outer forms of our sensuous intuition. We can never have any experience that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of interpretation and understanding—the mental logic that molds sensations into 3D objects. It would be erroneous, therefore, to conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process, as existing in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it a spatio-temporal order. The situation, as we have seen, is like playing a CD. The CD itself contains only information, yet when the player is turned on, the information leaps into fully dimensional sound. In that way, and in that way only, does the music exist.
Let Emerson’s words suffice, that “the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative.” Indeed, existence itself consists in the logic of this relationship. Consciousness has nothing to do with physical structure or function per se. It is like the stem of the ground pine, there reaching through the earth at a hundred places, drawing its existence from the temporal reality of perceptions in space.