When magic becomes an acceptable concept in science

Reading information

It has been known for more than a century that the world outside of the mind is nothing more than fields of energy. An atom is only a concentration of fields of electromagnetic and nuclear energy. What is an energy field? It is the capacity to cause a change in another energy field. It is not a spirit but a situation, which is at a point A but not at point B.

What could be more nebulous than a situation, except nothing at all? So, the universe (which includes our own bodies) is merely a situation and only becomes something more than that because our minds are here to observe it. Matter needs minds to bring it into a tangible existence. This is a rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick upon which we have done some reductionist thinking.

Just as the patterns of 1s and 0s in your computer software contains information, and energy fields can form patterns, then they can also contain information. Information does not exist in the absence of a reader. The mind is the reader. Animal minds are restricted to reading a lot less of the available information. However, some can read what we cannot. Examples are a blind bat in a cave catching darting insects by echoes and a bird navigating 10,000 kilometers to the very rock of its birth.    

Quantum physicists tell us that the conscious mind can even affect the behavior of atoms. That implies that the mind is not an add-on to the ground state but the ground state itself is shared by both energy fields and consciousness. That the collective consciousness of humanity is a major component of the ground state of the physical universe is a startling conclusion because that makes us God-like.

But we should not feel to be too divine! The information we are able to receive through our five senses to be processed by our very imperfect interpretative ability only allows us to form a particular model of reality. Intelligent life on the other side of our galaxy that have evolved to look nothing like us may have a different model which for them works just as well.

Is there a clue to the source of the magic?

The mind can only emerge out of functional nervous tissue. If anything goes wrong in that tissue, the mind changes. If the tissue dies, there can be no more mind - no ghosts on Earth and no souls in Heaven. The enfolded dimension is trapped within relativity’s 4D spacetime. Nothing in our future technology will ever see the mind because nothing physical can probe the non-physical. But that should not put an end to our speculation.

If you line up three balls of differing colours, you can rearrange them in six different ways. Add another ball of a different colour and the number of possible patterns jumps from six to 24. That is in one dimension. If in a box of sides equal in length to the four touching balls, the possible arrangements of those four balls in 3D is many times 24. With the principle of exponential increase understood, how many possible patterns in a brain structured in 3D could be formed by 100 billion cells each of which is touching 10,000 other brain cells? The answer is many times the number of atoms in the known universe.

The magic of the mind lies somewhere in numbers of incomprehensible size. That is nothing like an explanation - but it does give us a feel as to where the magic might arise from.