Then a Miracle occurs.

©Fernando Caracena January 2023

Some physicists think that Quantum Theory invokes th human conscious observer as the agent that establishs physical reality. John A. Wheeler went farther through his it "It from Bit" extension of this notion.

Wheeler suggested that our experience of the objects, events, and phenomena that constitute reality is the result of binary decisions — true/false, yes/no, on/off — which we make in the process of observing them.--The Marginalian

The body is a physical organism that exists in the material world, but the mind exists elsewhere. Yet it is present in the world through its connection with the body. Past blog entries here have approached this problem area through posts such as the following: Notes about Mind in Physics. These previous studies can now be updated as new empirically based ideas about consciousness have been developed by some modern psychologists.

Donald Hoffman says that we do not see the world as it really is. What we see of the physical world and what we control in it are through simplified symbolic interfaces, like ikons on the computer desktop that allow the user to interact with very intricate and complex digital operations. The whole process resembles the well known cartoon where in the middle of a mathematical derivation there are inserted the words, "then a miracle occurs".

The joke here is that it is not a joke.

And here is another historical wise crack:

A SHORT CUT TO METAPHYSICS.
What is Matter?—Never mind.
What is Mind?—No matter.--1855 July 14, Punch, Or the London Charivari, (Filler item), Quote Page 19, Column 2, London, England.

Do you stay awake at night wondering: "Are the mind and the brain two separate things?" Insomniacs can cut to the chase by reading about Descartes' Dualism and Mind in The International Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I think that Hoffman and others miss the point about what constitutes physical reality.

Clif High proposes a theory that pulses in time over a trillion times a second pile up enough energy in some spots to generate matter.

Using the whole, estimated mass-energy of the universe and Heisenburg's uncertainty principle I compute a flicker rate of the entire universe of about dT=7.37^-103 sec. or f=1./DT , which is 1.36x10¹⁰² sec^-1 . A much higher flicker rate.

The joke here is that after considering all the processes that go on in the brain. which we can understand as physical processes as digital signals and their digital processing, a miracle occurs that registers on the conscious mind as sensation that is full of the qualities that we are accustomed to to experiencing. Where did these qualia come from? They were not in there in the digital series of neural, voltage spikes. No, they are the product of sensations provided by consciousness to the mind.

I think that the connection between the mind and the body are best described through Swedenborg's philosophy, which I may take up later in a future post.

Some thoughts about the mind body connection were presented in previous posts, The Mind-Body Connection Part1