PSY-PHY

A Brief Introduction To Ultimate Reality

J. Andrew Ross

Book-format preprint 223 pages, PDF, 1.6 MB
 

The human mind is still in many ways a mystery to science. This book explores a framework for scientists to understand it. It aims to found psychophysics, where the science of mind meets physics.

Physics is the fundamental science of nature. Psychology is not yet a science in the same sense. The framing logic needs recasting. We need to recognize the role of becoming, or of evolution in the widest sense, to the task of building models in science.

The new perspective on psychology is radical. A logic of becoming distinguishes the big self from the little self. If the ego is the big self in being, the little self is projected into existence as a puppet avatar in a virtual reality, or a mindworld. As conscious beings, we live in a mindworld movie. Our lived reality grows in time.

The book introduces a new logic for science. It is written for readers who want not only to see how it works but also to enjoy the ride.
 

INTRODUCTION

The human mind as each of us knows it is still in many ways a mystery to science. We have a lot of work to do before we can claim to have cracked it.

My aim in this book is to explore this challenge and suggest a framework we can use to reach a deeper understanding of the mind in terms that make sense to scientists. I see the work as a contribution to psychophysics − my term of art for the future field at the interface of psychology and physics. Physics is the fundamental science of nature. Psychology is not yet a science in the same sense. It resembles biology before the theory of evolution gave biologists a unifying framework. Neuroscientists are nibbling away at psychology, but they still don't have a convincing theory of mind. Something is wrong, but no one seems to know what.

My diagnosis of the problem is that the framing logic for the challenge needs recasting. We need to recognize the role of becoming, or of evolution in the widest sense, to the task of building the models that do the heavy lifting in science. The idea that we're faced with a conceptually static reality, along with a geometric time dimension that exists outside of us, is wrong. It's been shown to be wrong by quantum physicists. When we respond with an open mind to this fact, the project of developing a conceptual basis for psychology can be made to look much less daunting.

But the task is still a tricky one. We need to dip into some deep and difficult logic and mathematics, and we can't avoid some alarming paradoxes that can make the whole enterprise look doomed. The journey takes us over rocky ground and seems to wander all over the landscape of our best theories about our place in nature. Happily, years of grappling with all this stuff has taught me to find ways of smoothing over the bumps and bridging the nasty patches, so the gloss presented here goes easy on its readers.

THE ELEVATOR PITCH

Given the new view of logic and math, plus the new view of quantum physics and the gusher of new facts from the neurosciences, my new perspective on psychology isn't weird at all. The weirdness was already absorbed in the givens. But it is a radically different perspective from the conventional view that faced the pioneers of psychology a hundred or more years ago. It will take some getting used to.

In short, we use a logic of becoming to distinguish the big self from the little self. If the ego is the big self in being, the little self is projected into existence as a puppet avatar in a virtual reality, or a mindworld. As conscious beings, we live in a mindworld movie. Each brief self is timestamped as it goes from being to existence, and our lived reality is a strange loop that turns and grows in time.

When it's cut this short, the new view doesn't make much sense. Any pitch short enough to deliver in an elevator ride is likely to be just as unintelligible. But if we make it a tad longer (imagine a fast talker in a slow elevator in a tall skyscraper), it might make more sense. Here goes.

When we let logic unfold into mathematical set theory, we find that a dynamic view of truth in a formalized theory of becoming looks rather interesting. When we then apply this logic to review time in physics, we find that it takes on a new character that's attractive from a psychological point of view. When we then see how the dynamic view of time unfolds in quantum theory, we find we have a promising new way to get a grip on the notorious paradoxes that make quantum physics seem impossible to understand.

This three-step development is all by way of introduction to the deeper view that follows − though it takes us halfway through the book to get that far. The science of mind we aim to glimpse is based on lots of experimental work in biology and on recent neuroscientific studies of mammalian brains, so we need to review all that next, as well as the wider debates that frame any such work. Then, in an easy application of the key results so far, the new view pops out with startling speed and clarity as a physical insight that pans out to a universal perspective of breathtaking scope.

A deep breath later, the consolidation of that outcome in logic and philosophy is reassuringly smooth. If we see reality as a movement from being to existence, we can assign mental and mathematical ideas generally to a virtual realm of being and reserve existence for the more defined and limited realm of things in spacetime. Then we can distinguish the ego in being from its avatar in existence and depict the temporal flow from ego to avatar as the frame-by-frame realization of a mindworld movie. After all that, we can regard our social life as a multiuser online game. That's the story.

GRAPPLING WITH PARADOX

It took me decades to think through the core idea, then years to sort out the rest. To find ways to bridge the yawning gaps in my early drafts of a narrative, I took some difficult detours through philosophy, logic, and mathematics.

My academic home port for embarking on the voyage was Oxford. The scientific need to work out a deeper theory of mind dawned on me in 1970 as an undergraduate reading physics who was struggling to get his head around the deeper issues stirred up by relativity and quantum theory. Then, at sea as a postgrad researcher, I navigated into philosophy, logic, scientific method, mathematical logic, foundations of math, and the philosophy of language.

A breakthrough of sorts animated me over the summer of 1974 in Berlin. I drafted a book in 1975 to sketch out my idea, which I took from handwritten notes to a bound typescript, but it didn't make much sense. There was obviously still a mountain of work ahead of me.

The problem was paradox. Classical logic, the logic we use to build computers and the internet, is intolerant of anything that even flirts with paradox and contradiction. Everything must remain rigorously consistent. This is clearly a virtue for any practical endeavor, and no sane scientists would wish to disavow a commitment to consistency. But it makes building deep theoretical foundations quite tricky.

The strategy I chose in Berlin was to stare down the contradictions that emerged in ambitious applications of logic. This would be like the two superpowers coldly staring down their political differences over the Berlin Wall. The paradoxes were deep and wide, but they weren't overwhelming.

Back in Oxford, I continued my studies, then worked in London until 1987, when I moved to Germany. There I did editorial deskwork on academic studies in math, physics, and computer science for a decade.

In the early years of the new millennium, still in Germany and working in software development, I took part in a series of conferences on the latest developments in neuroscience. Early inklings of a new science of mind were appearing on the strength of an impressive flood of new experimental work. Theoretical physics was also looking better. Relativistic and quantum physics had become the firm basis for all the sciences and inspired new models for cosmology and particle physics. The pieces were in place to get the job done.

THIS BOOK

The time was ripe to publish or perish. I published my best essays from the previous decade in my 2009 book Mindworlds, retired from software development, wrote a few more books, and returned to England in 2013. A few further distractions later, I can now offer this book to the world.

The great challenge for a project like this is to identify the intended audience and then to pitch the exposition at a level that supports and respects that audience. Even expert readers deserve explanations and references that suffice to locate and define the key ideas and innovations within a familiar frame. Readers who are new to the issues raised here are especially entitled to a full and fair presentation of what for experts may seem like elementary points that surround the main novelties. The challenge is to balance the wants and needs of all such readers without being boring.

In the end, I chose to compose a light and fairly readable main text followed by relatively technical notes and references at the end for scholars. This approach has sound precedents among expositions of novel ideas in science, especially ones that seem too unconventional or controversial to be squeezed into the straitjackets of peer-reviewed journals or specialist academic monographs. I want to reach a wider audience, and this seems the best way to do so.

The book has six fact-laden chapters. A bold teacher could recycle the material as a resource for a one-semester course aimed at STEM students who want to think outside the box. But my ambition is for the book to attract readers from many different backgrounds. If it failed to excite readers outside the academic community, I'd conclude that my efforts to make it readable, lively, and provocative had been wasted.

To whet the appetite of people who like to read the menu before consuming what may be junk in books like this, here's a quick overview of the six chapters.

The first chapter, BEING, reviews the relevant history behind the search for a scientific theory of mind and introduces the tools of formal logic and set theory we need to overcome the obstacles facing that science.

The second chapter, TIME, applies the new view of logic to the classical conception of time, as worked out by physicists and mathematicians, and explains in more detail how time works in a theory of mind. The third chapter, STATES, introduces quantum theory, with the aim of showing how the new logic of time enables us to avoid the air of paradox surrounding it, and hints at how the quantum ideas can help us in a theory of mind.

The fourth chapter, LIFE, starts with a review of how life on Earth has grown in modern scientific terms and continues by describing the brain and the tools we use to explore it.

The fifth chapter, MINDS, outlines a new way to understand how the brain supports the mind and proposes a hypothesis, rooted in modern logic and physics, to explain the temporal nature of conscious experience. The sixth chapter, WORLDS, introduces worlds of consciousness as mindworlds and then presents and explains nine laws of psychophysics to summarize the book's key message.

Between the fascinating details (some of them arcane), the main argument should be easy to follow. Though my own story is irrelevant to the case made here, I've included a few minor biographical comments where the extra facts seemed helpful. To make for easy reading, I've suppressed footnote markers in the main text. The notes and references are for specialists, and most readers will have no problem ignoring them. I've also suppressed URL and DOI data in the references − motivated readers can use the cited text to locate resources online with an intelligent search app.

This is not a scientific monograph in the traditional sense. But it is intended to introduce a perspective that makes a real contribution to serious science. As I said, I've made an effort to keep the journey interesting for readers who not only share my ambition to reach the destination but also want to enjoy the ride.

England, 2025