Background: many of us believe that the human mind includes but is larger than just what the brain produces. I hereby define the term "mental dualism" as the proposition that the human mind is a dynamical system which is some kind of symbiosis of "what you see" (with mundane eyes) and "what you don't". I tend to use the word "soul" for that second part. If you google the term "dualism" you will see an incredible variety of definitions and beliefs, most of which look pretty uninteresting to me, and in some cases crazy in a dangerous way. That's why I add the modifier "mental" here to try to bypass confusion and ambiguity.
My two word piece of terminology is not perfect, but enough to start. According to editors of a special issue of Activitas Nervosa Superior (a Springer journal), my paper on the physical foundations of consciousness is now in press. I assert vehemently that we do not know some important things about those foundations. If fully sane, we will not only admit our uncertainty but try hard to make sense of multiple possibilities. I mostly adhere to one of the varieties of hard core mathematical physical realism, either quantum realism or even realism ala Einstein and DeBroglie. But what about the possibility that the universe/cosmos is itself a great mind, a system whose very mathematical foundations are like neural network mathematics rather than Minkowski space mathematics? I agree with Stan Klein that study of such Cosmic Mind Idealism (CMI, not to be confused with the Cosmic Consciousness theory) may shed light even on finite minds in Einsteinian universes, but sanity says we should give it some direct attention as well.
In that spirit, this month I have been slowly reading and enjoying a new novel, Vita Nostra, which, among other things, expresses a CMI viewpoint on life and mind. I immediately gave the novel five stars on Amazon, for reasons I will not repeat here. But when I got 80% finished yesterday, I was sad that it was making less sense to me.This morning, in my usual samadhi start to the day, it made more sense. Suddenly it is like the time when Freud made more sense to me.
On a rattling old ship cruising off of Brazil with no wifi.. many reasons to be brief today. Key issue: in the "Alcymical marriage" of brain and soul, who takes the inituative and how? I have long felt pity for folks who try to explain psi as things done by specific suborgans in the brain. In an Einsteinian model, it is more a question of whether the brain is in a kind of criticality state sensitive to what the dark matter making up the soul can easily connect to, not only physically but mentally. The Platonic CMI viewpoint in this novel takes that same idea a step further. In a way, it says that all of us with a "heaven" aspect (not just the underworld aspect depicted in the great cartoon movie Coco) "are" archetypes, and that our growth is the action/manifestation/reflection of our personal soul archetype. The authors tend to assume that a great mind must be made up of words, because they do not know the mathematics of the deep structure underlying words, neural network mathematics, but it is clear to me this morning how to sharpen up their model, as once I sharpened Freud's theory of psychodynamics. But not to type on blog this morning!! The key idea is that the initiative may be even more from the soul side than I have assumed. Is it really THAT simple? Not quite. But further details are beyond scope of this post.
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