Binary Brain

I was challenged, and challenged hard last weekend about my insistance that the mind/consciousness is really nothing more than the material.  There was a lot of drinking involved, so I’m not sure how much of the conversations were coherent – but, in reality, that does not matter.  I’ve known great one-off thought to come from a night of dillusion.

What I did struggle with was all of this talk of non-local effects.  There is a piece of quantum mechanics that Bell calls the no-go theorem.  Loosely, it says that quantum theory breaks down locally or action-at-a-distance is wrong (if there is a physicist out there who can help me make a more coherent statement, please tell me).  The question is, however, how does this actually effect cognition/thought/consciousness?  I argue that the only thing it does is complicate any modeling we would try to do of the brain.  In the situation where we would ever try to duplicate a brain, I propose we would still never end up with the same consciousness in both brains because of uncertainty (physical) and the odd way in which external forces can impact local events (action-at-a-distance).  We hardly understand these things, but if our experiments are correct, we know that there is a level of uncertainty permeating every physical event and knowing the current state of a system will only provide us with a rough idea of the outcome on the other side of time.

Perhaps this is where fantasy comes in.  Complications in consciousness arise when we go beyond the physical input and stimulus that drives much of our behavior (by behavior, I simply mean activities) and there is where the development of fantasy comes in.  In order to plug the holes created by an inconsistent stream of physical stimuli, we have developed the mechanism of fantasy to fill in those holes.  What role fantasy plays and how it permeates our conscious life, is a whole other topic – but it is one I find thoroughly fascinating.  Does a Buddhist meditating feel the universe outside of local consciousness?  In two ways, this may be possible: fantasy or non-local action.  We could say that non-local action is more real than fantasy and therefore, we hope that this is really what Buddhists experience.  We could say that… but it isn’t necessarily better than fantasy.  Fantasy may be no less real than stimulus driven consciousness and we may find that it is the cornerstone to a new evolutionary development underway in the human brain.

I really have no idea.  As a pseudo materialist, I hope that the concept of fantasy will see more research and development, as I think it holds more promise to explaining what is really going on when we have religious experiences (which I believe are as real as a physical experience – just that our description of it is limited because language has always been closely tied to physical occurrences and therefore makes it difficult to convey a religious experience).  Any ideas?  Anyone?