From on the arguments of Nobel Prize
scientists, The Vital Dimension seeks to conclusively prove that life
is a nonphysical force that is unidentified by conventional science. Further, the book advances a revolutionary
theory of life that unites the material framework of biology, the theories of
modern physics, and the nonphysical dimension of conscious mind. The book is divided into three
sections. The first section traces the
limits of physical explanation from life’s mysterious molecular motion into the
operation of the conscious mind. The second
section proposes a nonphysical mechanism of life and mind based on the theories
of John Eccles and those of modern physics.
The third section investigates the ability of competing theories to
explain animals’ instinctive memory and the origin of life.
The author’s fascination with the mystery of life led from the study of biochemistry to a later to a search through the libraries of conventional science for a coherent explanation. When one contemplates the vastness of a human body composed of bead-sized atoms, an average cell is larger than a skyscraper! The entire human body of 100 trillion such cells stands twice the height of the Earth! Does a mysterious “glue” organize this fantastic assembly and hold it together?
Scientific discovery has moved human understanding from the realm of the supernatural to the substance of matter. Conventional theory asserts life and the mind are “emergent properties” of molecular activity driven by the known forces of physics. Is this true? Or is life a mysterious organizing force that conventional science resolutely ignores?
Erwin Schrödinger, the famed Nobel Prize physicist and father of modern chemistry, was fascinated by life because he could not understand why the molecules in a cell do not abide by the physical chemist’s statistical laws. In his well-known inquiry, What is Life?, Schrödinger expressed his total bewilderment at why life’s molecules mysteriously dance into ever-greater complexity while the nonliving world relentlessly moves towards greater “entropy” or disorder.
If forces in human-constructed machines are not imprisoned, they immediately move to disorder and a state of rest. But in a living organism, molecules never stop their relentless construction of living physiology. What directs this perplexing motion? Schrödinger was no vitalist and admitted distain for nonphysical explanation, but he could only conclude that life’s organized dance arises from a mysterious force unknown to conventional science.
The Nobel Prize physicist, Richard Feynman, explained that “force” is construed from the acceleration of matter. In simple observation, we see that forces act either in the “direct contact” of masses or at a distance as a “field” like gravity. Modern science asserts that life is not a grand organizing field. Yet, the continuous, regulated motion of living molecules bears striking similarity to iron particles on a page organized by an external magnetic field. As we shall further explore, might a mysterious organizing field extended through the modern physicist’s “thick” dimension of time to direct the dance of living matter?
Modern physiologists attempt to explain the brain and the mind as a computer. The renowned neuropsychologist, Karl Lashley, spent his life cutting into rats’ brains in a futile quest to decipher the brain’s neural wiring and locate memory. It has yet to be found. Looking at the brain’s activity, we see that the brain’s fluid organization of forces is diametrically different from a computer’s rigidly imprisoned forces. Again we find life’s mysterious force of molecular organization. In a little acknowledged theory, the Nobel Prize neurophysiologist, Sir John Eccles, proposed that the brain’s operation is directed by the nonphysical mind.
The eminent microbiologist, Herbert Jennings, in his studies of bacteria, paramecium, and amoebas found that their responses to stimuli were strikingly similar to those of large-brained animals. He concluded that if these tiny, one-celled creatures were enlarged to the size of dogs, we would readily see them to possess conscious choice, perception, memory, intelligence, and emotion. The fact that these mental qualities are present in minute bags of slithering protoplasm strongly supports Eccles’ view that the conscious mind does not “emerge” from the brain but is an independent, nonphysical force.
In last century, the certainty of classical physics disintegrated into radical new theories involving quantum strangeness and multidimensional fields extended into higher dimensions of space-time. However science’s conceptual framework of life has not changed in the four centuries since René Descartes proposed the theory of mechanism. It remains rooted in the discrete molecular interactions of classical physics. Might our understanding of life be on the verge of a profound revolution? Regarding the human mind, René Descartes, Werner Heisenberg, and others have argued that the processes of matter cannot begin to explain human creativity and endeavor. To provide an entirely new explanatory framework, John Eccles proposed that the nonphysical dimension of mind acts in the brain’s molecular realm of quantum uncertainty to direct the brain’s operation.
Chapter
8 - The Mystery of Memory
Memory provides the structure of life. Why does its operation remain the black hole of scientific understanding? Conventional theory asserts that memory resides in the brain’s material substance. But can the brain’s watery membranes truly explain memory’s enormous volume, chronological organization, cross-association of mental content, and great permanence? If we let go of our preconceptions of what is possible, could our memory of yesterday actually exist outside the brain in a greater dimension of time?
Chapter
9 – Memory and the Thickness of Time
Although time appears to be the forever fleeting moment, modern physicists assert that time is actually thick in the manner of the dimensions of space! Resembling a fantastic newsreel of existence, the thickness of time, or “block time,” is theorized to hold a record of all events since the origin of the Universe. In our recall of memory, might we actually “look” through block time to previous conscious experience? Block time is the ideal container for memory. It is permanent, chronologically ordered, and has an unlimited capacity to hold the mind’s endless stream of perceptions, emotions, thoughts, actions, and dreams.
Chapter
10 – Perception
Gestalt experiments on perception demonstrate that the brain’s stream of sensory impulses from the eyes is relatively unformed. Instead, our memory of previous experience “organizes” the amorphous sensory impulses on the brain’s visual cortex into the discrete forms we see. With a purely material view of the brain, how might one draw the neural wiring that connects this memory of past sights to the brain’s recognition of objects? An alternative explanation is that perception occurs from the spontaneous association of forms held in block time. In the following chapters, we will examine evidence this is true.
Part III – Weighing the
Evidence
Chapter
11 – Learned and Instinctive Memory
Given the human brain’s enormous complexity, the location and mechanics of memory might remain forever unresolved. But when we turn to the instinctive behaviors of animals, the mystery of memory becomes highly constrained. If memory exists in the matter of the here and now, instinctive memory must reside in the chromosomes’ DNA for this is the library of information passed between generations. But is this a reasonable theory? Birds possess great richness in both instinctive and acquired memory. A bird instinctively recognizes its parent’s beak, builds a nest of specific design, and migrates on a preset route. Does this complex perceptual memory of birds exist in DNA? Did it originate from random alteration of DNA’s nucleotides? And even if theorized “genetic programs” could carry a bird’s instinctive perceptual memory, how do fluid strands of nucleotides inflate the information into the bird’s brain? Or do the great similarities of birds’ learned and instinctive memory suggest that they both arise from birds’ conscious experience held in the rigidity of block time?
Chapter
12 – The Origin of Life
The current battle between science and religion has focused on the origin of biological form. Conventional science presents the Russian biochemist, I. Oparin’s theory that life appeared from the chance aggregation of molecules nurtured by vast quantities of time. But the real improbability of life––the sustained, directed motion of living molecules that so baffled Schrödinger––is totally ignored by conventional science. Even if molecules should have fallen into the complex order of a primitive cell, what sustained their highly organized dynamic for even a moment?
Chapter
13 – Sequence Alternatives that Fill the Universe
In a well-known analysis, Bernard-Olaf Küppers looked at the probability a simple cell such as a bacterium could have assembled from chance events. When he calculated all the possible ways amino and nucleic acids can assemble into strands that might compose a cell’s protein machines and chromosomes, the total number of unique DNA strands the length of a bacterial chromosome would fill the volume of the Universe! Might such astronomic improbabilities inherent in the theory of life’s accidental formation beg for an alternative explanation? Might Eccles’ dimension of nonphysical mind provide direction? Could the “mental selection” of nonphysical intelligence have assembled living form from patterns engraved in block time? Such a process is not in conflict with Darwin’s process of natural selection. But the possibility is so alien to the orientation of the mechanistic mind that it is summarily dismissed. However, Oparin concluded in later writings, the laws of chemistry and physics cannot explain the “purposiveness” displayed by life.
Chapter
14 – Conscious Intelligence
To further explore the nature of memory, we turn to spiders. An orb weaver instinctively constructs its rigidly defined lacework web. The assembly involves thousands of intricate motor actions and numerous decisions to place and tense the several thousand stands. Current biological theory demands that DNA carry this information. Again, the problems with the theory are numerous. Without conscious supervision and goals, how might the immensely complex portfolio of the millions of motor actions that build the web have accumulate in the genes? Motor actions can equally well proceed in an infinite number of directions. And the volume of sequence alternatives presented by the random alteration of nucleotides in a spider’s chromosomes vastly exceeds the volume of the Universe. Again, the gross improbabilities inherent in a purely material explanation for instinct beg for an alternative explanation. If memory resides in block time, an explanation readily appears. Like a movie of the process, block time contains the step-by-step design of the spider’s web. Might the spider’s conscious mind “resonate” through block time to replicate the learned patterns of previous generations?
Chapter
15 – Freeing the Cheetah
Life is an
ever-transforming, four-dimensional dance.
A mysterious “glue” synchronizes the expansion of molecular events. Something mechanically assembles atoms into
the fantastic physiology of an organism.
Is this the action of minute, floppy, one-dimensional strands of
DNA? Or is it block time? Should nonphysical consciousness provide an
information highway through block time, one obtains a cohesive explanation for
both the mysterious force that shapes biological form and function, and the
operation of human memory. To one with
a strong material view of the universe, the possibility that an animate
dimension of Mind organizes living matter might appear incredible. But a purely material theory of life depends
on astronomic improbabilities and logical inconsistencies that the demand
consideration of alternative explanations.
And should the conscious Mind be a force separate from matter, we are on
the verge of acknowledging a strange new dimension beyond the material
framework of modern understanding.