The Light Body

Posted on October 27, 2013 by James Cross
The Astral_Sleep by Jeroen van Valkenburg from Wikipedia

The Astral_Sleep by Jeroen van Valkenburg from Wikipedia

In my last post, I declared myself a materialist and posed the question: What kind of material is mind? Any one who read to the end of the post would realize that my declaration as a materialist was something of a trick and in the end I write that “the materialist argument has buried within it a deep secret. There is really no matter. What we think is material is structure – from the atom to the mind. If consciousness is material then the material would be in some sense conscious. Consciousness is one of the optimal solutions for matter to organize itself in space and time.”

Here I would like to continue my exploration about the material of mind. Continue reading →

Posted in Consciousness, Electromagnetism, Human Evolution, Origin of Life, Waves | 11 Comments

Mind, Life, and Tensegrity

Posted on September 28, 2013 by James Cross
Endothelial cells under the microscope. Nuclei are stained blue with DAPI, microtubles are marked green by an antibody bound to FITC and actin filaments are labelled red with phalloidin bound to TRITC. Bovine pulmonary artery endothelial cells (This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons.)

Endothelial cells under the microscope. Nuclei are stained blue with DAPI, microtubles are marked green by an antibody bound to FITC and actin filaments are labelled red with phalloidin bound to TRITC. Bovine pulmonary artery endothelial cells (This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons.)

My position on mind and consciousness is a materialist position. A materialist believes that everything is matter, that there is nothing above or beyond matter, that mind and consciousness are matter or derivable from matter and physical laws. By “matter”, I mean “matter” in the very broad sense that matter and energy, wave and particle, are all material. The strict materialist position must be that there is nothing that is not matter. So even an emergent property such as mind or consciousness would also need to be material.

If the materialist lets into his model anything that is not matter then the floodgates are open and there would be no reason to rule out a priori other non-material emergent properties – ghosts, spirits, God, or whatever. This is precisely Nagel’s argument in Mind and Cosmos – that is there is something about consciousness that is not material. So the strict materialist cannot argue that consciousness is non-material, even if it is an emergent property and dependent upon the underlying matter. Just arguing it is dependent upon the underlying matter isn’t sufficient.

So what kind of material is mind? Continue reading →

Posted in Consciousness, Origin of Life, Quantum Mechanics | 14 Comments

Wave Theory

Posted on August 18, 2013 by James Cross
Portland_Japanese_gardens_zen_garden

Portland Japanese Garden. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: I, Laurascudder

While the universe seems to be built in an orderly manner, it might that its imperfections, breakages in order, and even disorder are partly the key to its beauty and complexity. In a perfectly ordered universe, the amount of matter and antimatter would have been the same; but, if the amount had really been the same at the beginning of the universe, matter and antimatter would have annihilated each other and we would have no universe. Asymmetry is often seen in quantum physics. Many seemingly symmetric forms in the living natural world, such as sea shells generally only coil in one particular direction according to species. This can be traced back to asymmetry in the chemistry of life. Most of the molecules of life can be exist as mirror images but living organisms almost exclusively utilize the left handed configuration for amino acids and the right handed configuration for sugars belonging to DNA or RNA.

These observations about the universe as a whole may have direct application to our health and how we live our lives. While many of us crave and protect order in our life, sometimes too much order is not good. A Zen garden never has its stones perfectly spread equidistant from each other. The beauty of the natural world comes from a sort of dynamic disorder. Physical and mental health may not be a matter of perfect order and balance but is instead produced by a balanced chaos.

Continue reading →

Posted in Cold fusion, Randomness, Running, Waves | 4 Comments