Prof. Raman's "On a Resonance Theory of Thought and Spirituality" is an extraordinarily compact and simple outline of a theoretical "picture" of the structure of consciousness regarded as a universal principle. A friend told me that the paper needed serious reworking because of its spareness of detail, ambiguity, and apparent lack of relevance to scientific questions. On the other hand, I don't imagine that Prof. Raman intended to write about a fully-fleshed-out theory, merely to indicate the general outline or form that some such future theory might take.
In his 1999 article, "The Nature of Man-Universe Connections," Hungarian astrophysicist Attila Grandpierre fleshed out the physical details of something that looks very much like Prof. Raman's general outline. For he, too, is interested in the problem of consciousness and its universality, and wonders what its physical structure might look like.
What Prof. Raman calls Universal Thought Field is, for Grandpierre, the ultimate vacuum field, the fundamental quantum field or substrate in the universe that generates all the other fields. Its preeminent quality is consciousness, intelligence, perception. It is thus, in a certain sense, "alive." Indeed, Grandpierre grounds the life principle in precisely this ultimate field, just as matter is subject to it because this "ultimate vacuum" is the source of all the physical fields that govern the behavior of matter. Similarly, it structures the psi-field (knowledge, intellect, perception, awareness, feeling -- consciousness, mind [which includes the unconscious]). Grandpierre is presenting a "picture," built up on present-day physics and astrophysics, which shows:
| ...that an organizing principle has to be at work at the origin of the solar system and at the ultraresonant interactions between the planets and the solar core. The developed-brain approach to the Universe indicated that there may exist an EM and quantum-vacuum coupling between Man and the Earth, Man and the Sun, Man and the Universe. Moreover, it is indicated that the Sun shows a fundamental openness and ultrasensitivity, which presents it as showing a fundamental life-phenomenon known as perception. Perception is an interaction in which a stimulus enters into the perceiver, which transforms it by its own (biopsychological) laws, selects the information by its own interpretation, and reacts to the selected, developing an answer which energetically is amplified in a 'cosmic' rate R = EÚin/EÚout > 10^10. What is the reason for this 'cosmic rate' amplification? I suggest that the reason is to amplify the information that is important to the Universe as a whole, since the higher rate at which it is amplified, the more easy to transfer it to other macrosystems for further information processing. In that sense the ultrasensitivity of living beings is a participation in a cosmic information processing. In this way we reached a cosmic interpretation of the most fundamental life phenomenon. |
This evokes Raman's suggestion of the inter-relationality of UTFs and PTFs (mutually responsive and co-acting) and between PTFs (ditto).
On the physical basis that Grandpierre presents -- and it is so extraordinarily detailed as to beyond the scope of this writing -- "one can construct the following chain of events for an interaction between the mind and brain":
| In the first step the information is contained and mediated by the vaccum field. These vaccum waves may interact with electromagnetic waves in giving them their information in the second step. The electromagnetic waves then may interact with the biomolecules of the brain, like sunshine interacts with chlorophyll molecules transferring the energy of the sunlight into chemical free energy. Form this available chemical energy the activation potentials of the neural networks are built up. Nevertheless, all four steps could be simultaneously influenced by the vacuum waves. The frequencies of the vacuum waves obtained here are remarkably close to the observed frequencies at cell divisions. This circumstance suggests that the way vacuum waves interact with material waves can be a resonant phenomenon. The vacuum waves may trasfer their energies and information content to material waves at the same frequencies. The real energy transfer could be necessary only at the onset of some material processes in an upper level of the mind. Here, I suggest a picture in which the different levels of our minds may work with progressively more subtle material carriers, while the deepest one works with vacuum waves without any net energy transfer taking place in the end, because the energy taken out from the vacuum may be put back by the brain itself when reading important information from the psi-field. It could be the reason why only living organisms with a significant free energy content are able to react on the basis of the information read-out. |
Grandpierre notes, "The different vacuum waves couple us in a different scale to the cosmos and to our bodies and brains, while the electromagnetic and electron waves present couplings between our environment, our brains, and local neural processes. These couplings to different scales of the outer world represent couplings between our different mind levels, simultaneously. In this context, it is important to note, that these outer sources of information -- the Earth, the Sun, the stars, and the Universe as a whole -- do show a whole range of generalized organic processes."
In the end, Grandpierre's essay calls urgent attention to problems involving the evolution of cosmic and biological consciousness. The picture that emerges is that "Man and Universe maintain multi-level, dynamic, direct connections." Which is hardly surprising, since physical science has said that the universe is constituted by various fields that structure the activity of their relevant particles. If this view is true, then Man participates in the universe at all levels of his being by virtue of his participation in all its active fields.
I'll conclude with Grandpierre's own summary of his article:
| Important evidences are presented that may serve for founding research into the cosmological evolution of cosmic and biological consciousness. A picture is outlined in which Man and Universe maintain multilevel, dynamic, direct connections. Not only the formation of the material of solar system is regulated by a cosmic organization activity, but there are cosmic fields like gravitational, electromagnetic, scalar-EM, Higgs, and scalar massless cosmic fields involved in the cosmic regulative processes. The cosmic biological and psychological effects influence significantly the biological and psychical, collective and individual organisational processes. The cosmic connections between Man and the Universe do not represent a one-sided action, but a mutual, meaningful, life-given interaction, in which Man is also an active participant.... |
In the end, the Universe is a singular, living thing constituted by an active organising factor, "which expresses an activity related to material 'objects,' but the substance of which does not exhaust in physical principles but extends towards much deeper realms of existence."
That is to say: To Mind; Will; Life; and (ultimately, on my speculation) Love.
Maybe so, but not even at such an elevated level as the simplest bug. The universe and the stars and the sun and the earth and the weather on earth and on down in scale to atoms appear to be dominated by stochastic processes that follow the laws of thermodynamics. These should not be taken as any more than having the potential to support life processes--organic processes.
One thing right off the top of my head...
I believe that Grandpierre's ultimate vacuum field may be closer to the physics than Raman's thought field. But better than either of them (as fields) might be your own speculation of an extra time dimension.
The field theories are inevitably stuck with an arrow of time and causation, whereas under the extra time dimension - cause and effect are overthrown along with past, present and future. And superluminal phenomenon would be expected.
Thus an extra time dimension could host all the same phenomenon as Grandpierre's ultimate vacuum field while offering a much greater explanatory power for anomalies of consciousness over time (near death experiences, collective consciousness, faith healing, remote healing, precognition, retrocognition, extrasensory perception, telepathy etc.)
The extra time dimension would also have a greater explanatory power for dark energy...