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)
Putting together the two above ideas, the Mind-Object Identity explains with no difficulties consciousness, memory, dreams, illusions, hallucinations, and many other puzzles that have so far been true mysteries for the traditional sciences.
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.