Things, Laws, the Human Mind, and the Watcher
I am sitting on a chair, in front of my laptop, thinking as to how to begin this essay. In so doing, I become aware of myself. I am defined by my consciousness, my selfawareness.
The conscious I. The watcher, who watches over the body, and watches over the mind and its thoughts. Consciousness which cannot be defined tangibly, but which is felt powerfully and clearly and is in all likelihood a property of the stuff of which the body and the brain is made. Consciousness, which is an entity entirely distinct from the mind-brain, and which belongs to the organism as a whole [1].I look out of my window at the starry night sky. The universe out there, the material world, is the universe of Things. The stars and planets, galaxies, dark matter, dark energy, elementary particles, atoms, fields, are all things. In an extended definition, space, time, motion, and events, are also things. Thus the motion of Mars around the
T P. Singh (B)
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Homi Bhabha Road, Mumbai 400005, India
e-mail: tpsingh@tifr.res.in
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 75
A. Aguirre et al. (eds.), What is Fundamental?, The Frontiers Collection,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3- 030-11301- 8_8 sun is a thing. And of course, our bodies and brains, as all living organisms, are also things.
Then, somewhere, there is the world of Laws. Those abstract entities, rules, which are not Things. Rather, laws are elegant and beautiful bookkeeping devices which tell us how Things behave. We shall extend the definition of laws to include abstract concepts, such as force, mass, velocity, acceleration etc. Laws also include numbers, mathematical relations, and in fact all of mathematics. Newton’s second law of motion tells us how the force on an object relates to its mass and acceleration. The laws of quantum chromodynamics tell us how elementary particles such as quarks and gluons interact quantum mechanically, through the strong force.
The law of Fermat’s last theorem tell us that there are no positive integers a, b, c, n such that an + bn = cn if n > 3. We shall further extend the definition of Laws to include abstract mental entities such as perceptions, thoughts, emotions and ideas.In between the realm of Things, and the realm of Laws, is that vaguely defined but well-perceived entity known as the Human Mind. We physicists derive immense joy from using our mind to discover laws of the observed universe. But should we not ask how our brains do this? We shall define ‘fundamental’ as the process by which the human mind converts Things into Laws. The mind is an entity completely distinct and separate from the Conscious I—the latter we have called the Watcher, who watches over things, laws, and the mind, and watches over the mind converting things to laws. Understanding how consciousness emerges as a state of matter is unfortunately beyond the scope of the present essay, and we simply assume the watcher as a given.
This essay is about understanding the relationship between the watcher, things, laws, and the human mind. It is about the understanding of understanding.
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