Mind-Body Mystery
of René Descartes
Mind-body dualism is an idea created back in the 17th century by the philosopher René Descartes (Ruh-neh Deh-cahrt), who believed that the mind is fundamentally disembodied: Seeing no physical correlate for human thoughts, Descartes devoted himself to finding exactly where our imagination is, and what it’s made of…
Descartes’s ideas are a gateway to solving the mind-body mystery.
Parts
I. Thought
II. Mind
III. Objective Reality of an Idea
* Summary
Everything begins with imagination. When humans first started to walk upright, over roots and fallen branches, we began to recognize acute details in the terrain of the forest floor: We have adaptive intelligence. At some point, we turned our intellect inwards, only to realize that we’re all merely hypothetical.
This idea sparks a connection to two deep-seated intuitions: that we’re separate from our bodies, and that our souls are invisible and inaccessible.
In my opinion, a “mind-body dualist” would traditionally see differences in physical and mental laws, but fail to see that everything is ultimately one thing: The mind and body are actually self-dual, meaning they’re “the same-but-different”.
The mind and body rely on each other to exist, much like light and dark, or good and bad — so, they share properties.
Different thoughts can’t occupy the same state at a time, for instance, but because thoughts come from minds which emerge from brains and brains have properties of matter; memories and intentions have energetic properties active throughout real material.
Neurons are capable of instances of experience, and synapses are responsible for memory.
For life as we know it to develop, synapses must occur among cells to form networks that adapt a multicellular body through space. All life — even bacteria and plants — use ion channels, electrical synapses, and neurotransmitters to self-generate. This means the mind is closely tied to a compound present in all living cells, known as “adenosine triphosphate” (C10H16N5O13P3).
ATP was likely synthesized by the chemical storms of early Earth, and is used by all creatures as an energy intermediate for body movement and chemical synthesis. ATP acts as an extracellular neurotransmitter in both the peripheral and central nervous system, and is likely the foundation of consciousness.
Many sorts of organisms have attained awareness — at totally different points in history and likely in other places in the universe.
Planarians are the first conscious species on earth: A type of flatworm that are as old as land plants — 699,700,000 years older than humans — and live forever if they’re not killed. They are the first known species on Earth to have an ATP-centric brain, and can clone themselves via a process of proliferating cells called a “clonogenic neoblast”.
Bioelectrochemistry is the essence of the mind, and chemical laws never rest.
Everything is made of elementary particles beyond the atomic level. Thoughts, memories, emotions: all results of electrochemical activity in neurons. Therefore, ideas themselves are made up of energy.
Bosons are energetic force-carrier particles. Fermions are material: made of leptons, quarks, etc.
Our subcortical self is fermionic, where matter/stimuli are sent to be converted into bosonic perception/energy in the cerebral cortex (of the brain) as per something like Einstein’s mass–energy equivalence equation… E = mc2 says that energy and matter are interchangeable; different, but formally equal.
This is all to say, bosons/energy can arrange into stable collective quantum states — unlimited in size or number — called “Bose-Einstein Condensates”. Then, certain fermionic bodies are able to collapse these condensates (collective energy states) into perceptual events.
Collapsing mental states in rapid succession generates experiences — a phantasmagoria of mental images — which give way to memory and consciousness.
Brains convert mass into energy on a neuronal level, resulting in the experience we have in our mind.
But remember, energy isn’t actually “made of” anything. It’s just a term we made to represent change within a system — much like time — so, some types of energy are much more mysterious than others.
In today’s cosmology and physics, there’s a theory called “dark energy”, which supposedly fills 68% of the universe like a fluid and causes space to expand — though, let’s just say: the idea of “invisible power” is far from new.
As early as 350 bc, Aristotle posited a so-called “fifth essence”: pemptousia (pempto — fifth, ousia — essence). The Greeks held this to be an eternal and unchanging force made of a substance “born from the sky”, sometimes called Ether. Quintessence is another term derived from Middle English, taken from Middle French, from the Medieval Latin “quinta essentia”; or verbatim, “fifth essence”. Quintessence has long been said to be an eternal force that trickles through all things.
Quintessence is a quantum field in which our minds can participate.
* Summary
It’s not only possible for mental objects to pass over the space of one another, they can also interact in the outside world. Thoughts form a field, one that can be created at any time through a self-generative process known as a “mind”. The mind isn’t merely part of the universe, nor a window into it, but rather; the mind is an ethereal incarnation of the unexplainable: a “fifth essence”.
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