"On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness,
with Application to Anomalous Phenomena"
(1)
This theory proposes that reality is the product of a
dialogue between consciousness and its environment. "Consciousness"
includes every type of human experience, such as perception,
thinking, emotion, intuition, etc. "Reality"
includes every category of reality: the subjective reality
within us, and also the objective reality around us—the
physical environment we can see and touch. This theory
starts with 4 principles:
1) The purpose of any theory is to make sense of conscious
experience in the environment. Therefore, a complete theory
of reality must account for both consciousness and its
environment.
2) The "currency" of reality is information,
which can move in two directions: from consciousness to
the environment, and vice-versa. Consciousness can receive
information from the world, and the world can receive
information from consciousness, in ways that we do—and
do not yet—understand.
3) Common scientific concepts like mass, momentum, energy;
electric and magnetic fields; quantum and wave functions;
and even distance and time, are merely useful organizing
strategies that consciousness has developed to make sense
of the information passing between itself and the world.
As such, these concepts are just as much characteristics
of consciousness, as of its environment. They are, essentially,
terms that describe consciousness interacting with its
environment.
4) It follows that scientific concepts can be useful
metaphors for representing the true nature of consciousness
and conscious experience. At the same time, terms that
describe subjective impressions may be useful metaphors
for representing reality, including physical reality.
This perspective that reality exists at some intersection
of mind and world is not new, and has been discussed by
Francis Bacon, James Jeans, Planck, Einstein, and Bohr.
But PEAR's solid evidence that consciousness literally
shapes physical reality, as physical reality shapes consciousness;
combined with their finding that subjective factors are
critical to both processes, makes this perspective required
territory in an updated picture of reality.
"The Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness" paper
shows how physical and mathematical concepts can be applied
to describing consciousness, especially consciousness
anomalies. For example, the feeling of "resonance"
between an operator and the REG (or any other object or
person) may be described in the mathematics of bonded
systems. This could produce a number that relates the
potential of a person to affect a physical object with
which it is "resonating," or that relates the
potential for two people "on the same wavelength"
to transmit and receive information through anomalous
channels.
Alternately, the vocabulary of subjective experience
may be used to explicate physical phenomena that might
otherwise have been missed. For example, the different
types of "uncertainty" familiar to our subjective
experience, may help reveal and define new types of uncertainty
that exist in the sub-atomic realm—say, perhaps, new particle
behaviors in certain superposition or "wave"
states.
The possibilities of this new tool set, relating reality
as a dialogue between consciousness and its environment,
is explored in depth in "The Quantum Mechanics of
Consciousness," and also in another PEAR paper, "The
Science of the Subjective" (2).
(1) http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/FP_PEAR.pdf
(2) http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/sos.pdf
