The Self as Quantum Interface

Here's a starting point for some ideas about the Self that have been percolating in my skull for a while. This is a first pass at articulating some of these ideas...

What is the Self? The common understanding is that the Self is the psychological construct built up around the ego. It is the point of self-awareness, the image we have of our selves, and the surface on which we reflect the world around us. Trying to simply define the Self is difficult without using the word "self" - an example of it's recursive and slippery nature. We can say that it is the focus of I, or me. It is how we differentiate between the world of nature and the world behind our eyes. As a representation of biosurvival instincts bound up in the reptilian hind brain, the Self evaluates things & events and determines how they will affect us as individuals. In the human organism, instincts are abstracted up into the forebrain and bound to mental and emotional constructs. These abstractions into emotion, memory, and anticipation define the Self more completely but also make it more difficult to pin down. It is no longer simply the director of biosurvival but now ranges in the heights of cognition and the depths of psyche. All of our accumulated experiences contribute to our unique individual identity. From the Self we evaluate our past, direct the present and plan our futures.

But so far this examination of the Self neglects the true mystery and namelessness inherent within each of us. Yes, the Self is our uniqueness, our individuality, and the point of reflection, but what of the deeper, less tangible levels? It seems that as we drill further into the Self, it becomes less and less defined. The nearer we get to its root, the less we actually are as individuals. This is exhibited in the eastern meditative states of nirvana & satori where individual identity is sloughed off as the Self merges into the plenum of unity. At it's core, the Self seems contradictory to identity. Or rather, it becomes identified with something far greater and much smoother than the individual. It's like a raindrop falling into a pool of water. As it falls the drop is singular among many, distinguished from the other drops nearby. Striking the surface it is absorbed into the pool and its individuality as a drop is dissolved while simultaneously expanded to encompass the whole pool. Instead of reflecting the world from the outside of a small sphere, it reflects from the entire surface of the pool. As one delves deeper and deeper into the Self, more and more of creation is reflected on its surface.

Another way to look at the Self is as the initiator of free will. When you choose to move your arm across the table reaching for a glass of water, where does the initial impulse come from? This is the big stumper for neuroscience because we can only see the action potentials induced by the initiation, but there seems to be no recordable signature of the initiation itself. We can only measure the results of free will, not the impulse of will itself. The words I'm typing draw upon the contents of my memory, reflecting ideas and emotions, trying to converge on some greater meaning than just the sum of their parts. But what of the intangible inertia driving these threads of inquiry? What is the source of novel thought and ideation, the spark of creativity drawing something out of nothing? The Self, it seems, has its fingers in the quantum plenum, dipping its ladle into the stew of chaos to draw out the impulse of action.

If we accept the notion that the Self is a gradient moving between individual self-identity and unknowable unity, then we can examine the notion that it might be a direct link into the quantum plenum of probability. Our brains are, for all intents and purposes, finite. Our reductionist science has shown that thought and action are reflected in the firings of an innumerable array of neurons, differentiated and specialized to handle various tasks. This same science often suggests that the Self is an epiphenomenon of this vastly complex monkey brain. But the scales in which neurotransmitters function are nearing the quantum. The average vessicle of serotonin, for instance, is on the order of 400 angstroms across - a scale that begins to be affected by quantum uncertainty. Esteemed neurophysiologist John C. Eccles has noted that such a scale incurs an uncertainty of about 50 angstroms per millisecond. "It is therefore possible that the permitted range of behavior of a synaptic vessicle may be adequate to allow for the effective operation of the postulated 'mind influences' on the active cerebral cortex" (Eccles, 1970). In other words, free will may lie in the quantum uncertainty of neurotransmitters and their effects on neuronal firing. The brain is a malleable quantum device which may act as the conduit through which the Self creates. Whether the Self is an epiphenomenon of this quantum device or merely acts through it would seem irrelevant to this discussion. It is enough to say that there is a Self and it manifests within the quantum fields of neural networks.

Undeniably there is a Self and it does appear to exercise free will. Furthermore, the Self is creative and perfectly at ease drawing novelty out of a seemingly endless source of potential. So where is this endless source? It is the quantum plenum, the singular field of probability underlying all matter. It is the hologram of creation. All matter arises out of this field. At the subatomic level we understand that matter is formless, simply a dense soup of potential contained within a boundless point - a quantum wave function describing the probability of an event's occurrence. Heisenberg showed that observation is necessary to collapse the quantum wave function and cause possibility to undergo the formality of occurrence. The Self is clearly an observer capable of manifesting intent into reality, and it seems likely that it does so by tapping into the field of quantum probability.

The deepest function of the Self is, thus, as an interface with the quantum plenum. It is the locus of consciousness poised on the edge of the quantum wave function. Like Shiva, a blink of its eye can create and destroy worlds in an instant. Inversely, the Self might be likened to a valve through which the chaos of the Absolute flows into the mind, percolating through neural nets up into conscious awareness, modified by psyche and channeled through the human organism into action. Humans, it would seem, are indeed vehicles of god. Perhaps the margin between the Absolute and the Self is the residence of the Soul - the moment that divinity steps into matter, the wet grass of the Nile caught between the toes of Osiris...

If the Self is informed and driven by some link into quantum hyperspacetime, is it possible that hyperspace can be influenced by the Self? In other words, is it a two-way street? Clearly there seems to be some path of communication through such a portal. Telepathy, precognition, predictive dreams and psychic phenomena all seem to find explanation through quantum effects. The problem has traditionally been that neuroscience refuses to accept that quantum behavior can be extrapolated up into the classical realm. But clearly quantum effects go propagate upward otherwise there wouldn't be any matter at all. The complexities of a human brain could not exist without its quantum foundation. In our model thought itself is born out of the wave function and shaped by the higher levels of mind. Perhaps seemingly magickal, non-local events, influences, and communications between minds or between mind and matter might simply be a tunneling back out through the deep Self into the quantum plenum. Recent research has demonstrated non-local information exchange between paired particles. Mind is clearly capable of affecting brain chemistry on a very discrete level, so perhaps it can even encode spins for subatomic particles, given the appropriate conditions. At some point deep within the brain boundaries between Self and other dissolve into the field of quantum probability. When these boundaries fall, non-local effects could readily propagate throughout the entire universe.

Meditation, chanting, psychedelics, magickal techniques, and other methods can smooth out the gross self until the point of self reflection is at once non-existent and totally universal. In such states the interface between the individual and the universe nears identity, one mirroring the other. It is in such states when the barrier between the material plane of things and the subtle dimension of unity falls and information flows unhindered between the two. The creativity of the quantum plenum feeds the individual, and the energies of the individual feed the plenum. Like life and death, it is this flow, the oscillation between manifest and unmanifest, that pushes life ever forward into novel creations. The Absolute observes its Self through the eyes of creation. The human sense of self is a fragment of the universal Self, incarnate and bound within neural constructs. It is both the reason we've wandered from home and the path to return.

Posted by LVX23 at July 29, 2004 03:37 PM | TrackBack