Beyond the Mind: Source, the Foundation of Reality

Mind: I would strongly suggest that before reading further you read my blog post “The Mind: Who you are at any given moment.” To recap briefly: The world has a memory source outside of our minds. I use the word memory as in memory where a table becomes a table again even when it has been unobserved for a time, but that is not the whole story. When I gaze upon the computer monitor in front of me it is in my mind, and when I blink my eyes, the monitor remains where it was – memory. All of my sensory perceptions such as blue, rough, and sweet have to have a source and a way of processing that information. A brain processes the sensory input from a source into the experiences or qualia of what we can call mind. Everywhere I look, hear, smell, touch, taste I am confronted with my mind, which has been constructed by my brain from the emissions of sources, e.g. photons, electrons etc. from tables, computer monitors, and everything else that is being observed. So, source can be defined as a memory source that delivers the necessary information (photons e.g.) that a conscious observer requires to instantiate a table or anything else for that matter in their mind. It is also everything that a conscious observer is not currently observing.

What best describes reality in the universe we live in? Two major schools of thought are Idealism and Materialism. Idealism: From Wikipedia: "Idealism proposes that the essential nature of reality lies in consciousness or reason. It suggests that only the perceptible is real, or that only mental states or entities are knowable. It asserts that reality is equivalent to mind, spirit, or consciousness; that reality is entirely a mental construct, or that ideas are the highest form of reality or have the greatest claim to being considered ‘real’." Thus, according to idealism everything is in your mind. Materialism: From Wikipedia: "Materialism emphasizes the primacy of physical matter in the interpretation of reality. Here are some key aspects of materialism: It is a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all beings, processes, and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter. It holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. It directly contrasts with idealism, which asserts that consciousness is the fundamental substance of nature." Thus, with materialism there exists solid things in the universe other than what is in your mind. It should be noted that recent quantum mechanical experiments point to Idealism as the fundamental description of reality. However, the final decision remains to be determined, and as I will describe below, I propose a different view: source is the fundamental unit of reality.

Source: Mind is everything one encounters in life, which is in agreement with Idealism, but that is not the only thing in the universe. Far from it, there is source, which is not exactly Materialism either, the caveat being that source is special, it is pre-matter, a memory system. Source is simply the supplier, from the world, of all of our sensory perceptions. The computer screen that I am now looking at is source, as it is sending photons of light to me and my sensory visual system of my brain, which then converts this into a picture in my mind. Hence, what we see, hear, touch, smell and taste are all from different kinds of source. For example, I just lifted my voice recorder from the table that it sits on and I see that the table is contiguous cherrywood, but when I put the voice recorder back down, what is underneath it loses its cherrywood color because the color is constructed in my brain and produced in my mind, as is the voice recorder itself. Now what if I turn the voice recorder on and don’t pay attention to it and keep talking it will record, so that when I play it back at a later date I will hear what I recorded. There is nothing spooky about it, the voice recorder functions whether I’m paying attention to it or not. This is an argument against Idealism, as is the table in the room that remains a table even if no one is conscious of its existence. The argument is that if there is no conscious observer present yet the world wags on so to speak in a predictable manner based on a memory system. What I do know, is that my computer monitor is in front of the wall in some way, so that the photons that my brain constructs the room with come from the screen and not the wall behind it. So even if space doesn’t exist outside of the mind, a prediction of an extreme version of Idealism, the source has precedent, that is, things are in front of or on top of other things. I used to joke with my wife about what I called the Kidney Conundrum: if I’m not paying attention to it, if I can’t see it, and if I can’t experience it, thus if everything is in my mind how does it work? According to an Idealist, the kidney only comes into function retroactively from me urinating, hence the conundrum. With my view of the source the kidney is kept in a decohered state, defined by everything around it. I like this view much better than having to think that the past has to be created anew every moment. In quantum mechanics, there is a mathematical formula that defines a wave function that describes amplitudes or likelihoods of things occurring, such as the possible location of an electron. When an electron is detected in a particular place that means the previously coherent wave function has collapsed into a particular state, i.e. the electron itself, and all the other possible places the electron might be, are eliminated. As far as the source goes, I believe an unobserved table, for example, is in a decohered state. Thus, the coherent wave function of the pre-table source has been collapsed (decohered) by the constant bombardment of particles from the environment, not by a conscious observer as Idealism demands. The quantum mechanical coherent state of all the atoms in the table are nearly instantaneously decohered by the immediate barrage of particles from their environment, i.e. the table itself. What this decohered table actually looks like is impossible to say as we are only privy to our brain-constructed, mind-made image of the table. My mind is externalized; everything I perceive is my mind. The rest is source. By observing the table, it becomes instantiated in my mind from the source (pre-table) and my brain (the instantiating instrument). Hence, the source is a memory system, and it remembers how to present the table to me when I observe it again. Prior to observing the table, it is not completely undefined, but instead it is decohered source. Weirdness of Source: This brings me to a thought experiment: I was looking at a can of soda and thinking, what if someone else was looking at the same can? We would both be receiving photons, importantly different photons, would be reaching our eyes so in fact we would each be seeing a different can. Does this mean we're each in different universes? This multiverse view of things is quite different from Everett’s multiverse. In his version the universes do not interact in any way. This implies strongly that your source and my source are different even though we may be looking at the exact same thing. In the same way our conscious experience is different, our internal ‘I’s, our feeling of self-hood must be derived from our own unique internal source. The source is a memory system; what is the brain except for a memory system and a processor? Source in Review: We use source to create the world around us, when I am in non-REM sleep the entire world is source. When I start dreaming or when I wake up, source is converted into my mind, which is everything I peruse. From a source's point of view, I am taking the information it is supplying me with and creating a world with it. The brain is a world maker and that world we call the mind. The brain makes the world out of source. So, there isn’t a mind-body problem, there is just mind and source. So, to summarize source, it is everything that you’re not consciously aware of, hence it is not mind. Source is decohered pre-matter that carries out most everything that happens, from keeping car engines running, to having your brain process visual information such that it will soon become a picture in your mind. Though I do believe everything we encounter is our mind, I believe that space is created from source, and that it has precedence such as in front of, on top of etc. Source is in everything, it is a memory system, it has precedence, it is inanimate and animate, and it is everything that is not mind. So finally, what is reality? It is a construct that is dependent upon our brains converting sensory information from sources into our minds. Thus, source is the foundation of reality, and the defining entity of all of our perceptions.

The Simulation Hypothesis and Source: What I liked about the simulation hypothesis, the idea that we are living in a simulated universe ala The Matrix, is that it states, like a game, you only have to instantiate what you are looking at currently. This is an odd enactment of a conservation of energy principle. This weirds me out a little, as the limits of my visual field are all that are instantiated in my simulation just like a game program. The room next door is kept in memory as an object of source. In a simulation, the source fits in very nicely with this. The source would be everything that isn’t instantiated on the processor. Decohered source would simply be an object in memory waiting to be put on the stack of the processor. When I first thought of the source, I got the name from what I called a memory source and thought of it as part of a computer program. The processing speed of the simulation is at a maximum at the speed of light. Time slows down near energy sources/mass due to heavy processing requirements in a simulated universe. The startup of this universe from nothing is like a computer game booting up explaining the Big Bang. There is more than what we can see with our minds; there is the rest of the program. Decohered matter would simply be an object already constructed ready to be brought online. Source is what’s running in the background, like the subconscious of the brain most of what happens in a computer you do not see. Even with the nice fit with source, and other physical consistencies, I personally am not a huge fan of the simulation hypothesis unless someone can figure out a way to make it falsifiable (it is currently unprovable by scientific experimentation.) Further Reading: Sean Carroll (2019): “Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime.” Dutton.

Robert Lanza, Matej Pavsic, Bob Berman (2020). “The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality.” BenBella Books.

Anil Seth (2021): “Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.” Dutton.

Rizwan Virk (2019): “The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are In A Video Game.” Bayview Books