Physical Foundations of Biological Mentality

Abstract

Dualism struggles to connect two layers: the conscious mind and the physical workings of matter. It ignores a vast middle layer between the two, a layer that is beneath consciousness yet above known physical law. This middle layer is transrobotic mentality, a means discovered by Nature to transcend robotic mentality. This middle layer evolved over billions of years before consciousness emerged from it, assuming more and more functions critical to survival as species evolved. Consciousness eventually emerged from trans-robotic mentality (not from robotic mentality), first intermittently then later more-or-less continuously. But there is no direct link between consciousness and matter. Every moment of human consciousness is utterly dependent on processes that transcend the known physical processes of matter. Trans-robotic processes are in some sense physical because they are “powered by” converted mass-energy that disappears from the physical world (and can reappear in acts of free will). But in another sense they are not physical because they have genuine autonomy and externality from the known laws of physics. What we call mind is the simultaneous combined (and oft-times conflicted) operation of all three layers: robotic, trans-robotic, and conscious. Based on these conjectures, a new mind-matter theory is presented which predicts experimental violations in the principle of conservation of massenergy in living organisms.