Draft revision started on .18 April 01
The fundamental difficulty in bringing the study of consciousness into science has been neither the occult nature of the data nor the impossibility of correlating this data with data from other branches of science. It has been, rather, the lack of a conceptual framework in which consciousness is rationally represented as an integral part of the same world that is recognized by the other sciences. Insofar as consciousness cannot be conceived to be a rationally integral component of the world described by the other sciences, then consciousness will appear to scientists to be intellectually occult, in spite of its phenomenological immediacy." (Stapp H. p141)
The following is a summary of the longer essay 'Physics of Consciousness' which appears below it
Summary
We 'experience' truth, in the same way that we experience seeing or breathing. There is no question of rationality about it; that comes later. We must accept this experience,even have faith in our experience,otherwise we can't philophise or even read books about other peoples' philosophising. Our experience of truth clearly involves something more than the three dimensional world that we appear to live in. It comes as a bit of shock - the central problem in the understanding the nature of consciousness is the definition of just what it is that we must take as 'given'. I.e. What exactly can we perceive and what is it that puts us in a position to ask the question "What is the nature of consciousness".
There is a problem with current thinking about the physics of consciousness. Science, seeking results that were independent of what anyone thinks or feels, is accustomed to ignoring the fact that the ONLY reality we will ever know is the reality each of us experiences in our conscious minds. Science got by by taking it for granted that each of has a capacity to recognize truth, a capacity which has made it possible for us to accept our results i.e. to accept that they reflect an underlying reality, and to communicate them to our fellows. Up to now we have thought of that capacity as an infallible guide. However, quantum theory, which undoubtedly works, is now telling us that there is more to reality than that which we are happy to recognize as reality; physicists being forced to live with conclusions that appear contradictory. The fact that we can't see how something could be true does NOT mean that it is not true. Would it be surprising if consciousness, with which the greatest minds have grappled, and are still grappling, shared some of the same properties and needed some of these new solutions? What kind of thing is this consciousness which we experience? We have no problem in living and moving in a three dimensional world. We are aware in a more limited way of a fourth dimension, time, in which we can look neither forward or back. Science has operated largely within these constraints until quite recently and many people still trying to fit consciousness into the same three plus one dimensional system. However, just as four dimensional approaches did not get us very far with certain very important physical problems (twelve dimensions are needed for the latest and very successful M-theory, which provided an explanation for many of the facts that have puzzled us for much of the twentieth century). The extra dimensions help to explain observations that were previously incomprehensible. Thus it seems more than likely that the four dimensional world of our senses reflect limitations in our senses; reality, including, perhaps, our consciousness, is by no means similarly limited. Abstract i.e. not solely three dimensional, but very real concepts, such as peace, love, justice, hope etc. are familiar and accessible to all of us. Our sense of own identity is space and time free. Illness obviously is a disorder that involves the three dimensions of the senses and other dimensions as well. Music seems to involve not only our senses, which are largely comprehensible in three dimensions and time, but also the timeless world of realities like beauty, joy etc.. It seems that music extends well beyond our senses. Another mysterious part of our consciousness, which is less accessible to us, is the subconscious.
A problem arises however. It can be shown that there are some familiar physical phenomena, such as stable orbits and perhaps the human senses, which can occur in three dimensional space but not in spaces of more than three dimensions. However, modern physics has made it clear that there are some phenomena that require a many dimensioned hyperspace for an adequate explanation. It might be that our consciousness is unique in that some of its functions, i.e. the senses, operate in a three dimensioned space and other of its functions, e.g. the mind and the spirit, operate in an n dimensioned space.. It would appear that consciousness is the one single phenomenon of which we are aware that performs some of its functions in three dimensioned space and other functions in n dimensioned space. Our access is much less certain to the n dimensioned space than it is to the three dimensions of the 'ordinary' space that we have taken for granted in the past. The overlap of these two different sets of functions will perhaps be fully mapped one day. It can be said, however, that it appears that errors in the functioning of our senses can usually be explained in terms of three dimension physics or biology. This cannot be said of lapses of the things of the mind and spirit,unfortunately.
Psychology has, in fact, been working for quite a while with the mathematics of hyperspace even though the extra dimensions have usually been construed as independent linear attributes of the human psyche, without spatial significance. In fact, many of the mathematical techniques for exploring hyperspace had their origin in psychological statistics.
IDEAS: Whether or not extra dimensions are curved or not would depend on the presence of mass and energy as is the case with dimensions we are familiar with.
It is interesting to note that abstract concepts such as truth etc. appear to be independent of time. What would time look like from the perspective of hyperspace?
READING LIST
Chalmers, David J - Neural correlates of consciousness (three dimensional fixation!)
Deutsch, David - `The Fabric of Reality: the Science of Parallel Universes.' 530.01/DEUT Not very credible.
Elkin, A.P.'Aboriginal men of high degree'. (QUP 1977).
Greene Brian. 'The Elegant Universe' (Jonothan Cape. 1999) (ACT Library C1014616863)
Magee, Bryan - Confessions of a philosopher (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, UK 1997)
Nunn, C.M.H. et al (1994) Collapse of a quantum field may affect brain function. (J Consc. Studies 1:1 pp. 127-139)
Penrose, Roger `The large, the small and the Human Mind' (CUP 97)
Penrose, Roger - `Appropriate physical action of the brain evokes awareness' (Option C p101) Does this tell us anything at all about the nature of awareness? Is it the only thing that evokes awareness?
Searle, John R. `The mystery of consciousness.' 1997. This reviews the work of Penrose and others.
Stapp, Henry P. - Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics. Springer Verlag 1993 (This is one of the few books that speculates on the relation between quantum effects and neural pathways)
Tegmark Max & Wheeler John Archibald. '100 Years of Quantum Mysteries'. Scientific American. Feb 2001 p.54
Zeilinger,, Anton - 'A foundation Principle for Quantum Mechanics' 1999 Foundations of Physics Vol 29 p631
PHYSICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
By Gavin Byrne (First draft September 1998)
It is beginning to look as if quantum physics and our minds have a lot in common. In both, our `present' appears to be associated with a change from `many possibilities' we see before us to a single reality that which we subsequently see behind us. With our conscious minds, we can often influence which of the many possibilities is to become the single reality. With quantum physics we do not usually have a choice; the outcome is subject to statistical constraints. Some outcomes are more likely, others are less likely, but only one outcome occurs at a particular instant in time.
To explain the four dimensional (i.e. space plus time) world we like to think that we know, science looked for the simplest theories which can be tested against the facts. In recent years, it has found that four dimensional approaches did not get us very far with certain very important problems. Four dimensions and `common' sense just cannot cope; it turned out that we need more than three dimensions. (twelve dimensions are needed for the latest and very successful M-theory, which provided an explanation for many of the facts that have puzzled us for much of the twentieth century). It has been a matter of extending the mathematical logic that works very well in the three dimensional world of Newtonian physics (i.e. solid geometry etc.) into more dimensions, into `hyperspace'. The same logic that looks reasonably obvious in the three dimensions continues to work perfectly well in four, five or higher dimensioned worlds. E.g. the equation for a circle is x squared plus y squared equals r squared; for a sphere the equation is x squared plus y squared plus z squared; for a hypersphere, it is w squared plus x squared plus y squared plus z squared equals r squared. The extra dimensions help to explain events that were previously incomprehensible. In the case of quantum physics, however, we ended up with some apparently quite weird and intellectually unpalatable phenomena such as single photons appearing to pass through two slits, of Shrodinger's dead and alive cat, of multiple universes. It has been said that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct. It seems more than likely that our bewilderment arises from the fact that we do not have a realistic appreciation of the nature of time in our physics nor do we have senses which can cope with more than three space dimensions; the equations of classical physics are all reversible in time, whereas the real world is not, as a number of people have pointed out. The cup that falls and breaks does not put itself together again. Where we have difficulty is with the transition (and in this our consciousness appears to play a central role) from `before' `our present, our consciousness', when we can speak of quantum probabilities, to `afterwards', when we can speak of what actually occurred. A wave function indicates that a particle may reside in all its possible states at once. Observation reveals only one state. In quantum physics, this transition is described as a collapse of the probability wave function (which describes many possible outcomes of a `before' situation) to the one reality that we observe. In our consciousness, we pass from a 'many possibilities' state to a 'one experience' state by our observation or by the very similar process of deliberate decision. It may be that in the n dimensional world of the spirit, collapse of the wave function, i.e. decoherence is not inevitable in the way that it is in the three dimensional world. The second law of thermodynamics describes what happens on average in a large number of transitions from 'before' to 'after' quite well; it does not help us much in the case of a particular single event. All we can say is that the entropy, the disorder, of the whole system always increases.
However, in recent years, we have had to face a fact that we have always know; that is that appearances do not tell us the whole story, even in the `material' world. In the case of consciousness, memory, hypnotism, sleep etc. suggest that there is more to the human mind than than the four dimensional world of our senses. Whether what we perceive is computable, whether or not it is consistent with current physical theory, whether it is even plausible are secondary questions.; experimental evidence often goes against 'common sense' these days. We can hope that we our conclusions might still be reproducible and as rational as possible i.e. internally consistent and consistent with the observations reported by other people. One fact that is beyond doubt, even though the idea takes some getting used to, is that the real world has got more than three dimensions, even though three dimensions seem to be as much as our senses are built to cope with. (This should not surprise us. The `real' world of every day life seems very 'real' but how many of us have really grasped Einstein's insight that time is a property of space? Einstein pointed this out four generations ago!).
Our `reality' somehow is, in a sense, our consciousness, which is dominated by reason and experience; this clearly implies that the limitations of our senses are a central problem. Up to the middle of this century, physicists have taken consciousness for granted; in fact we have ignored it when doing physics, putting anything that involved the working of the human mind aside as if were not really one of physics's problems ('subjective'). We have been encouraged in this view by the fact that apparently complicated or even chaotic phenomena such as the behavior of insects or the apparent chaos of Mandelbrot sets can be generated by relatively simple nonlinear algorithms. This has also enabled us to claim that we are being `objective' when we are doing physics. The fact is that anyone who wants to get scientific papers published in respectable journals has had to be `objective'. The use of words like `we' and `I' are frowned on. One cannot deny that progress using these approaches has been spectacular and so, in the Western cultural tradition, it is not surprising that we have taken some pride in seeing ourselves as observers- to be `on the outside looking in or on', quite unmoved by what we saw. Mainstream psychology also has tended to deal with human behavior essentially from the perspective of an outside observer, notwithstanding the misgivings of people like Freud and Jung.
In the area of human consciousness itself, the `objective' approach has left us totally stalled. Discussion about external observable effects of consciousness, i.e. about such things as `psychosomatic effects', `neural correlates etc., is endless but it is difficult to see how such approaches are going to throw much light on the nature of consciousness itself. Consciousness CANNOT be dealt with objectively in the traditional sense of the word, as if it were part of the external world, because the only consciousness each of us knows is his or her own, which is, by definition, non objective; there is no other kind. With consciousness, we have no alternative but to acknowledge that each of us is `on the inside looking out'. If we accept the need to do that, we may get a better idea of what our consciousness is really like and thus relate it to the 'outside looking in' science we are familiar with. The word `objective' will have to take on a new and different meaning; it will now be concerned with the question - what are the facts of our subjective experience that we can agree are experienced by each of us and what is the most plausible theory that will fit these facts. One fact that we are learning to live with is that physics is telling us that we observers (i.e. our consciousness) appear to play some sort of central role in the forming or bringing into existence of the world that we observe through our senses. (This is consistent with something we have always known - that in a very real sense, our individual and personal consciousness is the only means each of us has interfacing with the WHOLE of reality.) CMH Nunn and coworkers in Southampton UK have also found some indication (J. Consc. Stud. 1:1 127-139, 1994) that quantum processes at a macroscopic scale occur when the human brain performs some elementary arithmetic calculations; perhaps that is also the level at which our `free will' operates.
What is the nature of this consciousness that it seems we all experience? Abstract but very real, concepts, such as peace, love, justice, hope etc. are familiar and accessible to all of us but appear to have nothing to do with space or time; they are a mystery to 3+1 dimensional physics. Another puzzling, and apparently space and time free, feature of our consciousness is our sense of own identity: we are confident that the episodes of our childhood that we remember are uniquely our own. We are prepared to go to some length to enable that identity to continue to exist. Illness obviously is a disorder that involves the three dimensions of the senses and other dimensions as well. Music seems to involve not only our senses, with their three dimensions and time, but also the timeless world of realities like beauty, joy etc.. It seems that music extends well beyond our senses. Another mysterious part of our consciousness, which is less accessible to us, is the subconscious. In creative efforts, the role of the unconscious is well recognized (Oliver Sachs); it does not work instantaneously. This also needs an explanation. It is worth noting at this point that none of these abstract ideas have anything to do with the size or age of the universe; nowhere in this immensity do we see any hint of what we know as consciousness. Mere size or replication won't do it. It is also to be remembered that the known universe is nowhere near big enough for it to be likely that life occurred by chance. (Paul Davies) (Note that this is a different question as to whether there may be life elsewhere in the universe. Consciousness will presumably present the same puzzle wherever it occurs.)
Experimental physics has compelled us to accept an n dimensioned world, the world of hyperspace. An obvious question to ask is whether hyperspace will also explain some of the puzzling facts that our subjective experience of our consciousness presents us with, facts which are incomprehensible in the three dimensional space plus time world of our senses, in the same way that many fundamental problems of traditional physics turned out to be. Does an understanding of consciousness require more dimensions? The fact that the most powerful mathematical techniques available for identifying independent sources of variability i.e. in exploring for extra dimensions, Principal Component Analysis, had its origin in the statistical analysis of psychological data, i.e. in the closest thing to a science of consciousness that we have had up to now, is suggestive. Psychology has, in fact been working with the mathematics of hyperspace for quite a while, even though the extra dimensions appeared to be little more than mathematical conveniences. A problem arises however. It can be shown that there are some familiar physical phenomena, such as stable orbits and perhaps the human senses, which can occur in three dimensional space but not in spaces of more than three dimensions. However, modern physics has made it clear that there are some phenomena that require a many dimensioned hyperspace for an adequate explanation. Zeilinger argues that the world that we experience, including those properties of it that express in quantum physics, can be resolved into bits and that fact makes the experienced world comprehensible
It might be that our consciousness is unique in that some of its functions, i.e. the senses, operate in a three dimensioned space and other of its functions, e.g. the mind and the spirit, operate in an n dimensioned space.. It would appear that consciousness is the one single phenomenon of which we are aware that performs some of its functions in three dimensioned space and other functions in n dimensioned space. Our access is much less certain to the n dimensioned space than it is to the three dimensions of the 'ordinary' space that we have taken for granted in the past. The overlap of these two different sets of functions will perhaps be fully mapped one day. It can be said, however, that it appears that errors in the functioning of our senses can usually be explained in terms of three dimension physics or biology. This cannot be said of lapses of the things of the mind and spirit,unfortunately.
One popular and effective psychological tool, Myers Briggs, uses four dimensions; each dimension is chosen so that is unrelated to the three others in the mass of the population. Personal Construct Psychology uses as many dimensions as are needed in the individual case. In 1965, George Kelly, originally a mathematical physicist, but at the time Professor of Psychology at Ohio State University, suggested that everyone acts like a scientist; that is, they set up testable theories when dealing with the world around them. Kelly postulated that "A person's processes, psychologically speaking, slip into grooves which are cut by the mechanisms he adopts for realizing his objectives." Notice that here, again, we pass from a `many possibilities' situation to a single outcome, just like the collapse of a wave function. Kelly outlined his ideas with this one fundamental idea from which he drew eleven corollaries. Unlike most psychologists and, reflecting his background in mathematical physics, he described his approach as having a lot more in common with Euclidean geometry than with the conventional psychology of the time.
As Kelly saw it, a person, as he or she grows from birth is continually confronted with experiences, some of which may be pleasant or threatening and some may be novel. In response, the person continually constructs a theoretical representation of the world. He or she then acts in a way consistent with that representation. This process continues in every waking moment of the person's life and appears to have a lot in common with the transition from `before' to `afterwards' i.e. our consciousness is the interface at which the `many possibilities' situation changes to a `one reality' situation. This sounds like the one way passage of time problem that remains unresolved in physics - whether it be referred to as an increase in entropy or as a collapse of the probability wave function.
The world picture that each of us puts together consists essentially of a set of theories that enables us to predict the outcome of a current or of an anticipated experience and to realize our own particular hopes and plans. This is, of course, just how scientist works and the term `personal scientist' occurs quite a lot in the PCP literature.
Kelly suggested that we devise our own measuring scales or 'constructs' against which we assess experiences. In doing so, we pass from a 'many possible explanations situation' to the single explanation that seems to us to be the most likely. Constructs tend to be either-or type scales such as 'tall or short', 'kind or cruel', `happy or sad'. These 'constructs' help us to understand the world and to control outcomes. We find a place for each new event in our life, such as starting at school or parenting a child, on the personal scales that we have adopted. The new event thus fits into our personal world picture that we are familiar with, and helps us to deal with the future. We end up with many constructs, all of which have their uses in an appropriate situation, but there has to be some limit to the number, of course. If a person held a separate special construct for each aspect of each situation, that person's world picture would become more complicated rather than less.
Some constructs are special; they have a `superordinate', or controlling, function to perform. These special constructs are often the ones acquired in childhood from our parents and are difficult for us to alter. We take superordinate constructs for granted and seldom give them much thought. When challenged by events to change them quickly, we may be faced with a cataclysmic process, a bit like a religious `conversion'; the prospect can generate a lot of resistance. We may be aware but not be too concerned whether the paint on the Town Hall is light or dark but changing between from one side of politics to the other is something else altogether.
There are three things to be noticed about the construct world picture that we put together. The first thing is that we use words to manipulate the ideas involved and to communicate with other people about them. Words entail the further complication that they can have an emotional significance for us that is totally unrelated to their rational, conscious or dictionary meanings. The second thing to be noticed is that the constructs of the same person may not necessarily be consistent with each other, since constructs are derived from different experiences at different times and places. As someone so crudely but so graphically put it, `When you are up to your arse in crocodiles, it is not always easy to remember that your plan was to drain the swamp'. The third thing to be noticed is that one person's constructs may not necessarily be consistent with those of another person. Each of us brings to a situation a world picture of our own, which, to some extent at least, is unique. For example, if I say that my friend Sally has a dark skin, one person may understand `dark skin' to mean that Sally is foreign looking, while someone else may understand `dark skin' to mean that Sally spends a lot of time on the beach. This kind of thing probably explains many of the misunderstandings and fights that occur. The response of different individuals to similar events obviously varies greatly. One person, with a lot of relevant experience at his or her disposal, that is, with an appropriate system of constructs may accept or even learn from a situation which another person sees as quite incomprehensible. The first person readily modifies his constructs but the second may be driven to despair by the situation.
A commonly used technique to elicit 'constructs' is to ask in what way do two out of three things differ from the third. For example, one can ask how two out of three other people differ from the third person. If one does this repeatedly and with a variety of different subjects, one can find out a great deal about the way a person understands the world. Somebody who lived through the economic depression of the thirties or in a prisoner- of-war camp in the second world war may understandably still have survival as a central concern; healthy-unhealthy, cheap-dear, nutritious food-junk food, scales would be very important to them. Somebody else who has lived a life of relative security and plenty would not give such constructs a second thought.
So, Personal Construct Psychology provides a plausible basis for understanding how human beings interact with the world. The formation of constructs occurs in our conscious mind as a rational response to external events; this is quite consistent with the Western philosophy tradition that came to us from the Greeks. We build a world picture which enables us to anticipate the consequence of current events as they occur. This amounts to trying to understand each event in terms of previous experiences. Often, particularly in a familiar situation, that plan will work quite well. For instance, most things that happen to us at home have happened before. However, if our house burns down or someone dies, we have to `think again' about a lot of things and modify our constructs to deal with the changed world that confronts us. As Kelly pointed out, our freedom to choose tends to be limited by our constructs. Our thinking tends to be constrained or `channelized' by our constructs. Kelly and his many successors developed very powerful methods of exploring and testing constructs; statistical and computer techniques play a central role. The theory provides a rational way of exploring what goes on in our minds, of making us conscious of a lot of what influences our attitudes and behavior and thus of understanding our reactions to life.
However, can psychology of this sort be the whole story? It appears not. If you were a new born baby, there would be nothing for you to start with, no words, no constructs, nothing. Also, there are times when we, as mature people, are unable to express to someone else our feelings. An artist, musician or tradesman cannot always express in words what it is that enables him or her to perform their work. People who are fluent in two languages can often think equally fluently in either language; translation of quite complex ideas from one language to another appears to be instantaneous, far faster than would be achieved if the translator were substituting one word for another or one construct for another. People can describe things that happened long ago in their childhood in terms of their current vocabulary. Anyone who has watched sheep dogs at work will know that dogs appear to show a great deal of understanding and appear to use constructs of some sort, even though they may have a very limited vocabulary, if any. So, words and constructs, useful though they may be, are a long way from expressing everything that influences us. This is the point at which the nature of consciousness itself becomes the central problem.
A minute's reflection suggests that, while our constructs and how we use them are themselves an important part of our experience of the world, they are not the whole of it. Life presents us with a sequence of events; our response at a particular time will depend on our choice of an interpretation, which in turn will depend also on the constructs we have that are relevant. We can, of course add to them by inventing new ones or by reading and talking to other people. When we act in terms of our constructs, we can determine our future situation to some extent. When we choose an interpretation or a course of action, we are in a very real sense creating an n dimensional (certainly more than four!) reality. It is not impossible that one or two of the psychological dimensions may be associated with the three dimensional world of our senses can so easily envisage. Quantum physics also has presented us with an n dimensioned world, the world of hyperspace beyond our direct perception, a world which we have difficulty in imagining. It turns out that this is exactly what an analysis of our experience of consciousness has confronted us with; once again our daily experience appears to be but the `shadow on the wall' of a real world about which we can only make make tentative inferences from our experiences in the space and time in which our senses operate and which we appear to share with each other. It is inteere4sting to note that the Aranda aborigines appear to have reached a similar conclusion - "Therefore, to be brought into full realization of Altjiringa, is to share actively in that stream of life and power which is not hampered by space and time." (Elkin, A.P. p4.)
If hyperspace does eventually provide a basis for an understanding of consciousness it does seem more than likely that three of the n dimensions will be the dimensions that we are familiar with, dimensions that our senses are built to handle. However, with extra dimensions, we can move in more than three directions. Bearing in mind the timeless character of many of the concepts that we often deal with in our daily life, it may also be true that time may not be such a factor in these additional dimensions. It seems that we may have access to a world that is literally `timeless'. Quantum physics has it that seven of its extra dimensions are `curled up tightly so that we cannot see them'. If its dimensions are also the dimensions of consciousness, it may be that an additional problem is with our senses. We are not aware of the extra dimensions because our brains are not built to deal with them directly.
Each of us appears to have our own space to move around in largely at will, for example from subject to subject; we can move our attention or our consciousness from the perfume of a flower (apparently ordinary space) to world peace (extraordinary space). We also appear to move to a quite different part of that space when we go to sleep. If we are to rely on what appears to be the universal experience of mystics in their meditation, it has a part that we can reach only in very special circumstances.
On the other hand, every single one of us, and perhaps our dog, is a first hand observer, an expert. Philosophers have also pointed out that the fact that we are able to perceive the truth of a proposition suggests that we have access to insight from somewhere beyond our conscious world. Illness, with its odd interaction between the physical and the psychological (`psychosomatic') may also turn out to be explicable in terms of n dimensional `physical' causes such as infections and `extra' dimensional processes that seem to be involved in the human spirit.
Time seems to be be a special kind of dimension. Twentieth century physicists, from Einstein on, and also St. Augustine who wrote in the fifth century (in that remarkable eleventh chapter of his `Confessions'), have agreed that time is a property of space and that space is a property of matter; you can have neither space or time without matter. We measure time without knowing quite what it is we are measuring but even the thing we measure appears to correspond poorly to the time we experience in our consciousness; statements about `halving' or `doubling' a period of time have plenty of meaning for us, but a sleepless night may seem to take forever but hours can pass unnoticed when we are agreeably occupied. Memories are realities that we can revisit. The present is a view from the ultimate perspective i.e. it is our fleeting experience of being `outside time'. Time is what provides the account of the `before' (memory) and `after' our present. The present is the interface between the many possibilities and the one event that is found to occur. In both the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics and in the present of our consciousness, we see the many possibilities situation replaced by the one that we observe. Time does appear to move in one direction only, although quantum theory suggests that we are involved in a two way transaction in time when we observe the world around us. However, from our present point of view, it is a one way transaction, from cause to effect. At death, something drastic appears to happen to the relationship between our consciousness and our matter and time. Death could perhaps be explained as a movement of the center of our awareness away from the world of our senses (of which time is a dominant dimension) toward what was formerly our subconscious, with the present four dimensional world, quite real and present, as a bounding `side' to the new hyperspace in which we now find ourself and in which time is just one of a number of dimensions. So, in our life after death, our birth and the events of our life, including our death, would appear `permanently present' in a time free world `after' death, i.e. in a very real sense, `timeless' world. It is almost as if our present `material' world would appear a bit like a picture on one wall of the n dimensional world, a picture which has a solidity now hidden from us. In other words, it may be that the events of our lives which appear to us so transient are part of a reality that is timeless.
Shakespeare apparently got our present world fairly right- `We are such stuff as dreams are made on'. However, it seems that the events that so fill our lives in this world may have a more `solid' reality in another world, a world of which we get only glimpses from where we stand at the moment. When we participate in the pursuit of truth and beauty, we may in fact be building an enduring world into which our consciousness will eventually expand and of which time is a minor dimension. Our traditional instinct that these things are important may turn out to be well founded. It is a shame that the dead do not appear to be inclined or able to contribute to scientific journals. Or is it better if we have to work it out for ourselves the hard way?
Note 3-3-98
Memory, hypnotism, meditation, sleep etc. suggest that there is more to the human mind than consciousness alone.
Note 22-7-98
Therefore, to be brought into full realization of Altjiringa (Aranda), is to share actively in that stream of life and power which is not hampered by space and time. A.P.Elkin 'Aboriginal men of high degree'. p4 QUP 1977.
14 November, 2000
We are accustomed to encompassing our world with an ovwewhelmingly three dimensional plus time world view.
However, personal experience, . mystical experiences reached by meditation or drugs are undoubtedly exhibit a reality over and above that of the familiar world of the senses.
G.F.Byrne
.11 June, 2000. WC 6329