In neuroscience today the driving idea is that brain is everything; specifically, that the term “mind” merely names some property of the material brain. This claim is obviously false. For the brain is a machine, no different ontologically to a printing press or lawn mower, and as such is incapable of manifesting on its own either the first person perspective or its owner’s sense of time passing—the sine qua non of conscious experience. Nor can it manifest the experience of…..
As a whole, the scientific community accepts as a matter of course the metaphysical view known variously as philosophical materialism, scientific naturalism or physicalism. Strictly speaking, the terms are not synonymous. Each, however, entails or implies the notion that the world we observe and attempt to understand consists of nothing but matter (or energy equivalent) and its various interactions. In other words, on the naturalist view, there exists nothing over and above the world of nature, not even our hidden mental…..
In a word, Yes, they are. And what they have in common is the moving present moment, or now. For after all, when collapse occurs, it does so now, instantaneously across the full extent of the wave function. And in the conscious being, the external world is experienced in a succession of such moments. As physics in 3 + 1 dimensions knows nothing of this dynamic side of time, little wonder that wave function collapse is standardly referred to as…..
1. Spacetime itself is self-imaging. An informal way of showing this is to take Maxwell’s equations and add to the Maxwell F μ ν and its vector source J ν two indices α and β , where the resulting tensors are assumed antisymmetric between α and β. This yields a new set of equations having the Maxwell form, but with F μ ν replaced by the Rieman-Christoffel curvature tensor R α β μ ν and vector J ν replaced by…..
1. The Law of Laws (LL; see Posts 3, 4) is a machine, generating particular single-particle laws dependent upon the behavior of wave field χ under spacetime transformations. Because χ is self-imaging and propagates in extra dimensions, each such law brings with it the prospect of new physics. Already we have seen in Posts 6 and 7 how, taking χ to be a Dirac spinor, the Dirac equation in 4 + 2 and 4 + 2 + 2 dimensions resolves…..
The Principle of True Representation (PTR) is no respecter of supposedly settled scientific doctrine. In Post 5 of this series I showed that, in a world of 4 + 2 spacetime dimensions—our world, according to the PTR—the graviton does not exist, implying not only that string theory is wrong, but that quantum mechanics and gravitation likely cannot be unified. Then in Post 6 I showed that, in that same ( 4 + 2 ) – dimensional world, flavor neutrinos are…..
(For a fuller account of the subjects discussed in this post see Ch. 4 and Sec. 12.4 of The Principle of True Representation.) I. Although originating in metaphysics, the Law of Laws (LL), once geometrized, predicts a variety of physical effects attributable to the presence of extra dimensions x 5 and x 6. The fundamental fermions are a good place to start, because in extra dimensions we have a good chance of resolving the twin problems of fermion flavor and family…..
As noted in Post 3 of this series, the Principle of True Representation (PTR) implies that the physical world is self-consistent, in the sense that it manifests independently of conscious minds its own exact representations of the facts of nature. This has the ring of metaphysics, which of course is what it is. In the present post I want to show how this principle of metaphysical self-representation is manifested in the real physical world. This means putting the Law of Laws…..
We are all familiar with the branch of philosophy known as the philosophy of science. My recently published book, The Principle of True Representation, introduces a new and complementary field of study, a branch of science one might call the science of philosophy. This, in essence, is the enterprise of solving the problem of the external world, with the prospect of encountering new and unexpected vistas of scientific investigation. “What on earth is he talking about?” one may reasonably ask. Let me…..
In the first of this series of commentaries I laid out my qualifications, such as they are, for writing The Principle of True Representation (PTR), a book on the origin of physical law. The present post, highlighting the need for a new direction in physical theory, points to three glaring deficiencies in our understanding of the natural world. I could name more, but these three alone suffice to show that our present state of understanding is radically incomplete, an indication that…..