The Matrix: the Mind of the Observer

Let me review. First, Science is befuddled with the implications of the bizarre Quantum world and Einstein’s Relativity that shook Classical Newtonian physics to the core.

In addition, after a century of head scratching by scientists about the implications of the New Physics, someone began to see the striking similarities of this strangeness to Virtual Reality (VR) or simulations.

Finally, others have carried this conclusion to the supposition this VR just might be run by an immense intelligence of whom Mind is fundamental. The Movie, the Matrix, dramatizes a scenario conjuring this idea. This view in fact has been around for millennia.

Our mind is the most certain reality we experience. I’m going to set aside that fact the mind can be deluded and addled and be subject to sleep. And the question as to whether our healthy functioning mind is in reality mired in ignorance. This is a position held by Eastern Mystics. However, some element of our being must be prescient enough to will to suffer ascetic trials to deliver us from the attachments that enslave us to misapprehension. It is the thing that observes and wills.

Significantly, one measure of our reliable grasp of reality is that our perceptions conform to others understanding. We talk and relate with others and we understand each other. We can work and play together. That’s an agreed upon and workable reality. We also know when others aren’t processing reality clearly like the mentally disabled.  

The mind is central. Contemporary science has spent a great deal of effort to argue that mind emerges from the brain or the mind is simply the brain. One challenge to the centrality of the mind is actually the one I just brought up; the mind malfunctions. Injure one part of the brain and individual’s cognitive functions can fail. A person with damage to the Wernicke’s area of the brain, an aphasia, may no longer understand spoken speech but can still read, for example. So the physical clearly impedes on the mental. And we’ve seen where dementia will eventually rob an individual’s ability to communicate. They become nonresponsive. This can occur with the mentally insane as well.

But the mind or the domain-general part of the brain (physicalists use this jargon to stand in for the term mind) can retrain the brain as well. This is called Plasticity. Blind people can begin to use the part of the brain ordinarily assigned to sight for location awareness and hearing. Blind Sight is the ability of people who are cortically blind due to lesions in their striate cortex, also known as primary visual cortex or V1, to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see. Science has determined that Blind Sight employs two areas of the brain that work in conjunction with the V1, which is damaged in the blind, to provide an awareness of objects not visually perceived.

Even more dramatic, someone experiencing repeated, life impairing epileptic seizures has had one of the hemi-spheres of their brain removed.  Extensive training can allow them to regain virtually all the functions that two hemispheres do. This raises questions about the standard narrative that there are areas assigned to the brain over evolutionary time.  As an addition to any evolutionary adaptation, we civilized people RETRAIN the speaking site of the brain, named Broca’s area to connect to the Visual Word Form (VWF) area of the brain, when reading is taught. The brain is rewired at under our training. This is actual modification of the neurons in the brain from repeated mental exercise to support activity of reading. So we are consciously changing our brains, begging the question what area of the brain does this? Ah, yes, that domain general, according to the neuroscientists (as for me, the “Mind”).

Science is still seeking answers about conscious brain activity. They have yet to determine conclusively, relying solely on various brain scanning technologies, if a person is unconscious or not. Most generally they have to check other vital indicators to know for sure. Therefore, physical brain dysfunction correlates with mental disability but does that prove the brain and mind are one? When the brain stops working, the person dies. That’s pretty conclusive one would argue. But I would hazard the brain fills the function of a filter rather than the source of all mental activity. I’ll pursue that line of thinking in a later writings.

Much has been done with brain scans. They point to electrical activity in one area of the brain being correlated with various mental activities such as speech (Broca’s area) or high level cognitive thought (cerebral cortex) or Wernicke area of language comprehension.  But truth be known, science is far from solving the “binding problem”. Under what process does the brain integrate our perceptions of smell and sight and cognitive thought and memory and self-awareness? Currently, under reductionist physicality, synapses fire in the brain in various areas, but only in a dim way does it provides clues to the nuanced sophistication that is our mind. There’s no “movie screen” which projects what we perceive that appears in the brain. Memory is stored all over the brain and parts of the brain co-reference each other. Language can start in one area affect another and the affected area can affect the original area. There’s really no area where the binding or integrating occurs, which leads some scientists to arrive at the obviously rash conclusion that consciousness is an illusion and it doesn’t really exist.

 Other oddities of the brain present themselves. How we can influence seriously basic bodily functions like our blood pressure (Oh my god, they just stuck a needle in my arm to draw blood…faint!) or heal ourselves with placebos (medicines in tests have to be more effective than the pill)? Where is the decision making area of the brain that decides to generate healing or cause a catastrophic drop in our blood pressure? These are attributed to domain-general activity, which I call once again the “Mind”.

Even thoughts, so real and intimate to us, are a mystery to science.  There’s no scientific way to record them beyond the obvious…someone tells you what they are thinking. No amount of measuring the areas of electrical activity in the brain or blood flow even by a magnetoencephalography (MEG), a super-cooled magnet, which can measure activity in a few thousand neurons, will get you to capture an actual thought.

Physicalism has no or little room for mental processes beyond the brain. But as I’ve argued the fundamental foundation of the observable reality is immaterial. Common understanding is that immaterial means nonexistence, but Quantum Physics contradicts this common conclusion. Matter prior to observation lacks spatial dimensions or mass or time; that is to say it is in a state of immateriality. In contradiction to Naïve Realism thinking there are no tiny particles of atomized matter orbiting the atom. The phenomena of the atom need to be observed, and upon measuring we detect real material particles, not figments of our mind.   

Thus the idea of an immaterial mind that inhabits the brain and thus the Matrix is far more reasonable then attempting to make sense of the Classical paradigm of naïve realism; meaning to say there’s independent reality aside from our observing it. The idea proposed there is a Reality composed of matter and forces acting on them and so the guess is that the brain must possess something like circuitry of a computer. It’s far more reasonable to posit an immaterial brain employing the wired circuitry of the brain to explain brain function. To gauge the “Quantum processing” power of the brain, one can look at an experiment by a Japanese Supercomputer in 2013 capable of processing 10 Quadrillion calculations a second. It mimicked one second of human brain activity and it took 40 minutes. The brain is certainly doing something far more powerful than a mere computer network.

Dr. David Chalmers, a Physicalist, denies the existence of the mind. Everyone including Chalmers, I would say, perceives the presence of a mind. However, since reductionist materialism can only recognize the wiring of the brain, the synapses and electrical impulses, the “illusion” of the mind is deemed spandrel, attractive add-on. The mind is deemed simply an illusionary add-on to the workings of the brain, emergent from the brain. Physicalist science has no explanation for consciousness so it doesn’t exist. It’s like looking at a computer’s electrical activity and its circuitry to explain the output of the computer without understanding its software.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Fundamentally, the world is immaterial as I repeatedly argue; just as our mind is substantially immaterial. And Quantum physics demonstrates the fundamental property of matter is immaterial. What we see appears real, solid and substantial. This is practically true but essentially in error. It’s only our measuring and observation that collapses the Schrödinger wave function. The observer participates with reality, if you will.

                                                                                                              

The Theory of Relativity, which began the shaking of the foundations of science at the beginning of the 20^th century, rattles our common sense world. Time slows down and extension shortens with velocity, astoundingly. But light speed remains constant. This certainly belies common sense.

The building blocks of the matter are fungible. One particle can take the place of another. A proton can be substituted for another proton or neutron for neutron. Those could be considered the pixels of the Simulation. And pixels can’t be examined intimately. Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainly explains that either location or motion can be measured but not both. The fundamentals of the universe are exasperatingly elusive.

The fact is our minds are immaterial, while matter is fundamentally immaterial. All is mental in a manner of speaking and in one way the world is in our mind, or arises in our observation since we have no other way to know the world, as a sophist might suppose. But we can’t control the environment around us. And so we begin to realize that phenomena arise similarly to a Virtual reality generator of a SIM.

The Simulation only generates reality as we observe it, much like a video game where the room or scene is produced as we engage the game. This is an illustration of the Matrix, which raises another question re: the Matrix. Who runs the Simulation ? Aliens of vast intelligence? Occam’s razor would lead you to the conclusion that our reality is generated by a vast intelligence, far greater than our own. And that intelligence wouldn’t need a virtual reality simulator but operations that are simply ideas. These ideas would be produced in the Mind of a vast intelligence, something immaterial beyond space, time, mass. Ideas akin to magic. Plop a caveman into our society he would liken it to something that was inhabited by magicians. The powers of a Supreme Being would appear to us In the Matrix like actual reality. You might say this is a SIM so powerful it has haptic abilities, pressure, tactile sensing and smell and substance not just extension.

And as far as we know there’s no simulated reality unless we observe it, yet phenomena change and grow and decay without us. Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) in response to John Locke’s Primary and Secondary characteristics of matter argued for the mind observing the ideas of God, as fundamental. These ideas upon our observations produced the phenomena we experience. He reasoned that aside from the Secondary qualities of extension and color and weight and dimension, there’s not much left. So phenomena are something the observer perceives. Not wishing to be criticized for being a Sophist (A World simply being figment of our mental imaginings), God is seen to maintain the ideas that generate our phenomena. Knowing, as I have repeatedly stated, the world goes on without us. Berkeley would argue we can’t know if there is a world without us, the perceiver but trees bloom and become green and then change color and lose their leaves.  The world doesn’t bend to our wishes. Other people don’t kowtow to our wishes.

Berkeley would sound rather fanciful, if he wasn’t in a long tradition of thinkers looking at the world as mental. St. Gregory of Nyssa contended that God was in all and by all things, like water in a sponge, if you will, and understood ideas in the Mind of God to be what were said to be the Platonic forms. This is another way of saying the Divine runs the Matrix. Earlier Plato narrated his Allegory of the Caves; which suggested we are deluded in thinking the shadows we see are the truly real thing, in reality if one is properly enlightened, outside the confines of the cave we could perceive the substantial reality. For that matter there’s an extensive Eastern Tradition of Hinduism and Buddhism that denotes the material world as a veil of delusion; I’ll leave it to someone else to carry the argument to that extent.

Despite my rambling about, there’s good reason to suppose we might best be described as avatars in a Matrix. I would like to think the world we inhabit notwithstanding its tragedy and suffering and disaster is run by a Divine Being who ultimately in His Omniscience, knows what he’s doing.  Doesn’t mean I don’t question circumstances. I’m pretty sure He has a sense of humor. Things don’t always make sense, do they?

Combining the insights of Quantum Physics and the foundation shaking implications of Relativity with the rich Idealist tradition, and realizing the surprising congruences  between Simulation (VR) and the world described by the New Physics gets you to immaterial Mind as fundamental.