Mind

Of the great mysteries (and I think that there are four - first, the first impulse that created space-time with the expansion of energy and matter, what caused that? - then, the phenomenal organization of complex chemicals in the first cell, did it "emerge" from the intrinsic complex pattern of stuff, or was there a patterner at work in its design? - third, mind, awareness, what is it? and where is it? - and linked to that, no-doubt, to the mystery of consciousness, fourth, what is beyond mind? what is spirit?) of these four great mysteries the one that hooked me when I was young was the mind. I've been trying to grasp the mind, it seems, ever since, and like with other instances of introspection, one risks disappearing up one's own fundement. Nonetheless, that was the task I set myself in my teens, to understand consciousness. Of course I've been frustrated, mostly. There was a moment of illumination. As described in my treatise, Pattern and Resonance in the Natural World in chapter one, Beyond Substance) I was privileged to be involved with some intriguing work at the University of Toronto which appears to demonstrate that homeopathy is a harmonic phenomenon, and that homeopathic remedies are patterns of oscillating dipoles. As explained in that essay, the fact that homeopathics not only interact as they do with personality, emotions, "mentals", but that these interaction are the most important factors in choosing and proscribing homeopathic remedies, suggests that mind, in its turn, is essentially a pattern. But what, after all, does that tell us?

To ask, "What is mind?" is to ask more than one question. We might wonder, "What is consciousness?" we might ask, "Why do we do what we do?" The second question is in the purview of psychology. The first has languished in philosophy and metaphysics. There are two broad avenues by which we might approach the topic of awareness, consciousness. We might start with our primary data, our experience, and try to analyze mind from the inside - mind trying to look at itself. On the other hand, we might posit that mind, awareness, emerges in animals during evolution. In that case we might treat mind as a biologically based phenomenon, at least to begin. But let's split the difference and start instead on the train platform last Sunday...