Charles Pinter - The Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics

Charles Pinter

Mind and the Cosmic Order

How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics

1st ed. 2021

Logo of the publisher

To the memory of my late wife Donna Krewedl Pinter, without whom this book would not have been written. And to the archetypal muses who gave shape to my words and thoughts

Lets begin with a thought-experiment: Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxiesbut all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of lifeand the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.

To living beings, the universe has all the color and detail given by the senses. Due to biological imperatives, we are made to imagine that objects really are exactly as we experience seeing them. We likewise imagine that when we observe things, it suffices to cast a glance at them and their structure is immediately and directly revealed to us: We are not consciously aware of the elaborate computations that our sensory systems do in the background. Consequently, we believe that what we discern is already out there, just as we see it. We have a nave idea that our eyes simply harvest the bounty of structure and shapes that exist in the world independently of us, inviting our glance.

Shape and structure are incorrectly believed to be an inherent aspect of solid matter: Actually, they are produced by the synthesizing effort of observers. We are misled even though current knowledge explicitly reveals that our nave thinking is flawed. In contemporary science we continue to view objects uncritically in the categories constructed by the senses, and investigate them in terms of features attributed to them by our organs of sensation. Even hypothetical entities such as elementary particles and force fields are dressed up to look like things were familiar with.

The honeymoon with the senses, however, is coming to an end, and fundamental physics is emerging in a new form. For example, the theory of quanta has been stalled for a hundred years by what appears to be a paradox. It has been known for almost a century that when a fundamental particle such as an electron is not observed, it does not exist in the form of a material particle but as an abstract wave of probabilities. Yet, the instant the same electron is observed, it springs into reality as a material particle having a position, speed and direction of motion. This fact presents a huge dilemma not only for physics, but for our very concept of how the world worksfor it suggests that the conscious mind has causal power over material phenomena. (It doesnt). The reason for this apparent anomaly is that we conflate physical events with the way they appear to our senses.

The time is now ripe, in science and in philosophy, to undo this tangle. The advance of science requires us to redraw the boundary between the physical world and the world as it presents itself to our senses. Our innate model of reality was designed by nature to promote the survival of our species, not to probe the cosmos. To understand the universe, the first step is to understand our senses and how they mold our picture of reality.

For example, the logic of animal vision requires that what we see appear to be located in the world outside of us. Thus, objects are displayed to the beholder at varying distances laid out in ambient spacethough the visual image is actually formed in the viewers head. This is a necessary deception built into the brain by nature. In fact, its a kind of hallucination. This paradoxical fact is in the very nature of sensory perception. Everything we perceive is a hallucinationnot because what we see is mistaken, but because forms and features arent aspects of brute matter but creations of perception. (See e.g., Andy Clark,