Where Matter and Thought Touch

WHERE MATTER AND THOUGHT TOUCH EACH OTHER

I’m always wondering if there is a boundary that separates thought (or consciousness, if we want to call it that) and matter, but that also functions as a connection channel between the two domains. I basically wonder if there is a continuum between mind and matter.

Inevitably I think of the brain, made up of matter and therefore of neurons and synapses: the electrical connections in this area generate thought and therefore also consciousness. If there was no matter there would be no thought, this is the conclusion. The standard model of thought obviously does not take a turn.

Therefore, without matter there is only absolute emptiness, nothingness. Even time and space would not exist.

And yet suddenly a Universe is born, ours and certainly many others. It is born as a singularity from nothing: a contradiction that violates the principle of conservation of energy and mass.

Except that what we call “void” is made from a kind of turbulent foam where virtual particles are born and die continuously. It is not a mere real emptiness, but rather a real emptiness that suddenly comes to life and creates, without a purpose, and does it forever. This is a real magic, the one that emerges from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.

Let’s now go down to the Planck scale, at 10-33 cm, and just there we will find transient tunnels that connect mind to matter and vice versa. Of course no one has yet shown that the quantum vacuum is the seat of thought (or “creative thinking”?), But I like to think so. Because I already know that it is so.

I still have to thank the matter and the brain for being we able to think about all of this. The brain is the seat of an electrically functioning thought. If there were no matter and the brain we could not think as individuals.

But probably the thought that I believe is based in the quantum void, the one that continually creates new matter in the form of fluctuations, some of which evolve as universes when it goes well and like ball lightning when it goes wrong, doesn’t care if our individual thinking is active or not. It is simply a perpetual machine that no one can stop, and has no teleological purpose, although representing a kind of absolute consciousness. This is an impersonal and eternal perpetual machine that however knows how to laugh at the ideas of “god” that have been given to it over the millennia of human history.

Who, here on Earth (or elsewhere), knows how to connect or tune into that perpetual and perfect machine, the random machine of Creation (basically the god of atheists, even if they don’t know it), occasionally performs miracles: both in heaven and on earth . The day in which our science will be able to understand how the process happens to control and pilot it at will using some form of technology we will also become Constructors of the Cosmos. Perhaps his will happen when we will understand something more about the nature of brain microtubules and the DNA that makes up our bodies.

Music by Totemtag