Most scientists believe that mind, or
consciousness, is an epiphenomenon of brain function, so they would state the
mind-body problem as, “How does the brain create the intensely personal
experience of consciousness?” David Chalmers calls this “the hard problem” of
consciousness; it has never been definitively answered.
Readers of this blog should know that this
question has no answer because the brain doesn’t create consciousness. Mind
creates itself as a logical entity
that is atemporal and aspatial, that is, it has no position in space or time.
It does have a logical structure in which all possible logical concepts imply
or are implied by each other, combining in all possible ways to form other
concepts. As I explained here, this logical structure
forms a layered hierarchy of logical concepts in which the layers can be seen
as occurring at different times. In this view, mind becomes a physical universe
in which there are brains that create temporal or physical pictures of mind
that are different in each brain. The reason that philosophers find the
mind-body problem so difficult is that they don’t know that there are two aspects
to mind and the universe: one atemporal, aspatial, and purely logical, and one
temporal, spatial, and physical. (Actually,
you can think of the logical universe as physical too, just in a different
sense, and I actually did that in an early post, but lately I’ve been using
“physical” to mean just the temporal universe.)
So here we are in the physical universe, and
we’re looking at our minds to see if they have two aspects. Well, yes, they do.
On one hand, we are exactly the same unchanging person from birth to death. On
the other hand, we change all the time. These are two ways to see the logical
concept we call, “I”. The unchanging aspect of our mind has no connection with
the changing aspect. It doesn’t “do” anything. It simply exists. It is an
aspect of everybody’s mind, yet it is unconnected with anybody’s personality.
It is identically the same concept in all of us, and it exists always and
everywhere. There is only one such atemporal mind, only one logical universe.
The changing aspect of our mind is generated by
our individual brain. It lives in the physical universe and perceives
everything about us that is physical, including our individual personality.
There is a temporal mind for each of us.
The temporal mind exists within us and dies
when we do. The atemporal mind exists always and everywhere. Nothing creates
it; it exists necessarily. Mind is thought, and thought exists because a mind
thinks it, so atemporal mind must think itself. This is the essence of
consciousness: a thought thinking itself. As René Descartes realized, consciousness implies existence: “I think,
therefore I am.” In fact, atemporal
consciousness is precisely identical with existence. This isn’t true for
temporal consciousness and temporal existence. Philosophers have argued for
years whether consciousness is prior to existence or vice versa. Well,
atemporally there’s no question; they’re identical.
So now we have the answer to “Why is there
something rather than nothing?” Existence/consciousness exists necessarily. The
next question is, “How does the physical, temporal, universe come to be?” This
is what I’ve been explaining for years on this blog. The short introduction
might go as follows. Take the logical structure of mind with its many layers of
concepts or ideas, each successive layer containing more concepts than the
previous ones, and look at the successive layers as occurring sequentially in
time. Call the concepts “points of spacetime.” Now you have a big bang, with space
expanding in time, and you can apply the mathematics of physics and quantum
mechanics to discover the details of the universe and make predictions that
turn out to br correct. Since I’ve already explained this on this blog, I won’t
do it again here. If you want to slog through it, follow the link above and
read the posts in chronological order. You can skip the ones that deal with
side issues. Happy reading!
