The Spread Mind
The Spread Mind is a theory about consciousness and about the physical world. It is a simple yet radical hypothesis about what conscious experience is in a physical world. It’s a fact that according to current neuroscience, the brain does not contain consciousness. Neither does anyone has any clue as to how neural activity can produce conscious experience. So what?
The solution is to consider a radically different hypothesis about what consciousness is. This hypothesis is the Mind-Object Identity. To cut a long story short, the hypothesis is simply that our experience of the world is one with the world itself as it exists relative to our body.
The Spread Mind moves from two obvious facts:
- Consciousness is physical and, like everything that is physical, must be located somewhere in space and time.
- Consciousness is whatever has the property of one’s consciousness
Based on such fact, when you have an experience, say, of a red apple, what is the thing that is closer to your experience of the apple? Clearly, it is not the brain, but it is the red apple itself.
So far, neuroscientists and philosophers of mind have dismissed such an hypothesis because it has run afoul their most entrenched beliefs (first and foremost, that we are a ghost inside the brain). However, we have no reason to believe that consciousness is physically located inside the brain.
In order to cope with the existing scientific evidence from neuroscience, the Spread Mind articulates in two key ideas:
- Physical objects are all relative objects (as in the case of relative velocity as of Galileo)
- We exist in an extended space time whereas everything spans over finite spatiotemporal distance (as we know as of Einstein)
In a nutshell, the spread mind is a mind-object identity theory that states that one’s consciousness of an object is the object one is conscious of. It is a theory that changes our place in nature. We are no longer a ghost inside a machine or inside a body. We are the world itself.
How to know more?
While the basic idea is super simple (“The consciousness of x is x”), there are many details that need to be uncovered.
As the great physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz once said, “the greatest part of a scientist work is to explain the ideas one had.
There are various ways to know more about this theory. The best is to subscribe to my blog and to check the many applications and new developments of my work.
Another way is to read my books or papers or comics or listen to my videos. In this website you can find plenty of freely available materials and many links to other sources.
