Where should I start a topic that talks about figuring out what consciousness is all about?

I remember when I first saw THE MATRIX with my hubby in a movie theater. Of course, I thought, all the things we see out there in the outside world are virtual realities. It’s our perspective on things (that so far, we hope) has worked for us to understand the world around us.

Except, what we see out there in what looks like a surrounding universe is the universe from its own local perspective—Us. [Physicist John Archibald Wheeler thought we were the universe becoming aware of itself].

How do I know that what we see out there is the product of our own mind (at least to some extent)? It’s because a neuron or dendrite (nerve cells) don’t look anything like what we see out there (of course, unless we’re looking at those cells through some kind of microscope).

So, we ask ourselves in awe: How can little cells with all those branchings, or groups of those cells, create a language that results in our naturally-selected reality/our-perspective?

Actually, I probably need to go further back than that in my sleuthing out of consciousness. There are topics that need refining like what is existence? What is experience? What is awareness of experience? And what opportunities comprise the conscious mind?

Unlike what a high-energy/particle-physicist studies, my published pure research is comprised of studying the curvature of boundaries. Boundaries define systems. They surround and represent changes between systems (relationships between those systems). The simplest way to define an unstable system (one in which the boundaries change (like in our universe) is by the TENSION within the force field they’re subjected to and the CURVATURE resulting from any location along that boundary. In math terms, in this model, it’s the TENSION in the boundary TIMES the CURVATURE of the boundary that results in the forces across and deforming those boundaries.

Now, you might ask, what does that have to do with neurons?

The Square/Cube Law helps us understand the degrees of freedom of interaction of two systems (or a system and its environment) across a boundary. The Square/Cube Law simply lets us see the differences between the energetic activation (degrees of freedom of energetic energy) of small and large systems depending on the surface areas of their boundaries. A large three-dimensional object like a sphere has a smaller surface area to volume ratio than a smaller three-dimensional object. So the smaller an object to start out (maybe just a simple system: a planet, or cell, or particle that is approximately spherical) the greater its degrees of freedom for interaction. And a human nerve cell with all its branches neatly fits the bill of a shape in which the boundary is way greater than even an average spherical shape (the more boundary created in a system (fractal dimension heading from 2 (surface area) to 1 (boundary/path), the more surface area to volume). [the problem that supposedly prevented more recent scientists from using Galileo’s Square/Cube Law as the basis for the Theory of Everything (T.O.E.) was when they got to ever smaller particles (like the subatomics of outer space) they were faced with the problem of outer electrons moving so fast that it was difficult to say they represented a surface area. However, with some thought, we do not see why instead of starting with larger to smaller objects in our universal spectrum of sizes, we do not start from the smallest, since large objects/systems also are constructed with the same electron shells as their surfaces. The same conundrum occurs when we try to calculate the length of a boundary of a continent with fractal dimensions (see Wolfram’s A NEW KIND OF SCIENCE) to understand how fractals can be differentially applied to boundaries.]

All systems move by oscillating (due to random perturbations) in both straight-line motion and rotational motion through the available kinetic energy expended. Nerve cells within the nervous tissue of the brain must oscillate at their own frequencies. Each time the cell oscillates by expanding, it becomes unsteady and the initiation of internal boundaries is formed. [As a nerve cell relates to other nerve cells, the oscillation is damped or constrained by these relationships (whereas, free-living cells oscillate at their own frequency, unhampered by the collective).]

Now that we’ve introduced oscillation as a type of energy expansion, how in the world might this oscillatory motion start?

First of all, we need to realize that nothing in our universe is exact. That is important in understanding how an instability can arise (How things can start to move?). There are many astrophysicists and cosmologists that ask what came before the theoretical singularity source (Big Bang) of our universe that happened approximately 13 plus billion light years ago.

By relational philosophy, things/objects are products of the boundaries/changes between systems. In other words, our universe is subjective, depending on boundary location. So before there was energetic (kinetic) energy in our universe, it had not cooled down enough to condense out of the potential energy (virtual energetic fields) near any singularity. As things cooled (available energy to do things (like condense into real particles) dropped, changes began to coalesce into boundaries. The first change in the universal boundary might have been a simple offset of an initially expanding sphere (now, don’t forget that what we are describing are models for what we observe). Those who disagree with our models, can explore the changes in boundaries (the tension and curvature) and decide what is required to make the offset boundaries shape themselves like continuous sine waves. The following is what we observed in experiment [https://theunionofopposites.com/the-experiment/]:

Why can an expanding circular droplet, for instance, get offset from its center (centroid or cg)? Our universe,in order to exist, must have even an infinitessimal amount of spacetime. Our universe can never experience zero. Zero energy would be zero spacetime, and, then, with zero spacetime, our universe would not exist.

An experience (for a system to experience another system outside, or inside, itself) there must be a difference/difference-boundary. The simplest case might be when two systems are moving together at the same rate (like a human standing on the surface of the Earth). At the equator, the human and the Earth’s surface are traveling at 1,000 mph, and so, they do not experience the difference (therefore, the difference does not exist). But to the boundary of an expanding droplet, when it is resisted by another system outside itself, it first offsets from its center, creating a flow field that expands (the crest of an incident deforming sine wave) and a flow field 180 degrees from the crest (the trough of the sine wave) that resists the outward flow. These two regions (trough and crest) have different curvature and so they will continue to behave differently.

Many reference articles for the oscillation of droplets injected into a Hele-Shaw Cell (thin horizontal mold) have sinusoidal boundaries of quantum number one (one crest and one trough), but the researcher observing it from the outside only sees a perfectly circular boundary. Upon measurement, we find that one side of the droplet is closer to its center/centroid than the other (remember, zero doesn’t exist), the radial flow experiences a small difference and responds by expanding on the sine-wave crest and resisting expansion at the sine-wave trough. [In this deforming droplet experiment, we are seeing the interfacial tension as analogous to gravitational tension (Fg/d) that exists between universal regions of spatial expansion and gravitational attraction.]

Here is a link to (an illustration of) what is seen in the lab when an expanding droplet (thin in depth) invades an outside fluid with same viscosity (please paste the following link into your browser’s address):

Click to access the-first-cell.pdf

Note, because there is always error in the system (a perfectly zero difference doesn’t exist), what appears as a static water-based droplet in oil-based fluid will go unstable and buckle into a sine wave. Except, at this very low expansion rate, the sine-wave trough will begin to differ in curvature from the crest (and appear to burrow into the droplet). This is how a circular cell can automatically begin to divide perfectly in half (or determine the location of its future nucleus).

We are coming to a close in our thought experiments here. Since there is always leftover energy in all fields (like the electromagnetic field), cellular life has a way of utilizing it through ordering its boundary. The first step in increasing its boundary in reactivity is to lower its fractal dimension through division. The cell may not fully divide through this process, but as radial/straight-line flow increases, so does rotational flow (according to the General Energy Equation), intensifying the inward trough resistance (perhaps similar to a black hole due to gravitational-well resistance).

Through panspermia, perhaps, complex nucleic acids began to rain down on Earth and through natural selection may have amplified the cell-division process, so further functioning pathways could evolve. [Note that since this post was first written, panspermia has somewhat fallen out of the archaeologists’ sphere of probability. That might mean nucleotides and RNA would have arisen during Earth’s volcanic activity, rather than from outside the Earth.]

Next, we’ll attempt to look at action/reaction of those paths/entropic-boundaries becoming internalized in the cell and becoming more complex. This is where the arrow of local subjective time most possibly was born.