where is consciousness?

A quick addition to the last post. I wrote to Jay Ingram's podcast with a few ideas that I have been working on for a while.. so I will put here my letter as well.

Hi Jay and David:

My name is Rodger and I am a physicist (Canadian) living and working in a center of excellence (government research) Ensenada México. While my research is not related directly to consciousness study, this has been an area of intense interest for many years.



While listening to another podcast (Zencast) and an idea was formed in my mind when the presenter asked "where is thought?". This problem is mentioned many times in other forms (on one of you previous podcasts as well.) For the answer I would draw on several types of thought. The first is a Quantum physics approach. That all we have are experiences. That is, the entirety of "reality" that we see is made up of a limited number of experiences. So that we can only really talk in terms of these experiences. So then "reality" can be thought of as the accumulation (or combination) of these experiences? (to measure something we cannot directly sense, we need something to change this even to a sensory even, i.e. a voltage into a picture on a screen.)

So the mind has these inputs of sensations and from this makes an idea of reality. In other words, we make a virtual model of what is outside of us, inside our minds. It is like a computer, if I were to place several cameras onto my computer, and have it look at the room, I would then write a program to interpret the images seen to make a model of the room inside the computer. This can be why new things take more time to see, because we don't have an object of this thing in our mind, so we need to look at it for a long time, and program it in. But when I see my girlfriend, I have a well made model of her, and don't need to look as intently. All I need to do is clarify which model in my mind is this person.

With out going into more detail, I would then say, that our "reality" exists as a construct inside out mind, so that our consciousness, our thoughts are actually all around this reality, or more such, outside of this reality. You can almost think of the Russian doll: the outside doll is what "really exists". The next doll is the "mind" which is inside a black box with very few sensors sticking out. Inside the shell of the mind is the virtual reality that we form, and this is the "perceived reality". Most of us then try to project our mind as coming from the model of ourselves in this last doll, thus making another doll.

As an extra note, you can then say why the ego is false, or doesn't exist by stating that the projected mind into our virtual reality is the ego, and as already noted, doesn't really exist.

I hope this makes sense, and I look forward to you comments on this. I've put in a pdf to express the idea..