| 21st Century Philosophy and Neuroscience | ||
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Comet Collision with Jupiter The interface between events out-there and the mind involves uncertainty. Events out there are transformed by brain processes to bring them inside, to know and speculate about what we know. We are smart enough to recognize a few patterns and some of the order in the mesh of causation that is out there. We can recognize that neuronal transformation in the brain is the prerequisite of all knowledge. Perhaps, our brain is the device that works in 4 dimensional spacetime and not the universe. It is easy to argue that our neural transformations act like compressors and only sample some of the features of events out there. We speculate about other dimensions or "realties" but we really cannot get outside our embodied mind. Whatever else is going on, we cannot know. Heisenberg recognized that in the microcosm of photons, electrons and subatomic particles, there is uncertainty inherent in the nature of these minute devices. While we can represent an electron as a charged ball and describe electron behavior in terms of position, spin and momentum, the quantum physicists have decided that electrons, unlike balls, are not so substantial - they often are blurred and do not occupy one position in space, but dance around in a region. They may be considered to be vibrating strings rather than vibrating balls. Electrons cannot be located the same way that a baseball can be located. If a pitcher throws a ball fast enough that an observer cannot see it, an image of the ball in flight can be captured with a high-speed camera. An observer can review the film leisurely and locate the ball in flight in millisecond increments. We are accustomed to objects having a rather determined location in spacetime, even in motion. Our practical physics describes the relationship of time, location and movement as a change in location over time. The idea of small subatomic particles as less determined in spacetime is difficult to understand and cannot be done with models of larger objects consisting of intact atoms. Heisenberg's uncertainly is sometimes taken to mean that the human observer has difficulty locating the position of an electron in some ideal spacetime context because the act of observing always changes the position and/or momentum of the electron. Both the observer and the observed involve uncertainties that preclude exact knowledge. This uncertainty does not diminish the value of a wave function that describes electron behavior, it simply acknowledges a limitation. The term, Karma, should include the recognition that the observer and the observed form an indivisible whole event. All humans face uncertainly always. Everything that humans witness, know and talk about is a bundle of outside and inside events. All observation changes the observed and the observed changes the observer. If you remember an event, that event has modified the structure and function of your brain.
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Topics from the book, Neurophysiology of Consciousness
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From the Book of Existence and The Human Mind Book 1 in the Philosophy and Neuroscience Series |