Let us take digital and analogue music recordings as a path towards a better understanding of the dualism of reality. The dualism of reality is perhaps the most discussed topic of philosophy from ancient times. It can be better understood through analogy with analogue/digital recordings.

Both recordings, digital and analogue of the same music, can exist simultaneously. From both sources, “same” music emerges. While generations that never heard analogue recordings cannot imagine that analogue recordings produce more realistic sound, they can also not remember unpleasant sounds coming from vinyl scratches. Only after we submerged completely into clear sound coming from digital recordings do we appreciate unpleasantries of analogue recordings. They proved music to be alive. Analogue recordings without scratches would be like life concerts without coughing.

Suppose we take further steps in conceptualising the human mind from a digital/analogue perspective. In that case, it should not be challenging to take it as an entity that belongs to both the digital and analogue world, obeying both quantum and relativity principles. (It should be noted that neither mind nor consciousness is located in brains – but in a totality of human phenotype and extended phenotype.) Mind analogue ontology happens through chemistry, while its digital nature comes with electric currents evoking on or off state of neurons. But how does this dual nature show itself; what is a phenomenology of such dual nature?

Analogue mind

If one aspect of the analogue nature of mind and consciousness should be mentioned, that is a feeling of a continuum. We feel as if we pass through time smoothly. Bumps like sleeping time are absorbed as a switch from such continuum, but we still feel a continuum as a background regardless of our absence. From neuroscientific research, we know that this continuum is an illusion. Still, evolution taught us at the same time that perception is reality: if it feels like a continuum, if it behaves like a continuum, it should be analogue.

Digital mind

What should then represent the digital nature of our mind? There is one positive and one negative proof. The positive one is telepathy. I know that I fall here in the trap of circular argumentation: since we know that quantum entanglement exists, telepathy should be possible in principle. Telepathy cannot be proven otherwise as much as consciousness cannot be. Telepathy and consciousness exist only as an individual experience, as private emergence, as much as each emergence, including music or colour, exists only as a private experience.

The negative proof is the incapability of computers to penetrate our minds. Being digital or even being quantum is not enough to penetrate human minds, human consciousness. This inseparable duality of mind makes it a mind, and it is this duality that cannot be reached by creatures without phenotypes, without arms and legs.

We do exist in all sizes

It is no longer speculation to physically explain telepathy as an emergent property of living creatures (including humans) from their existence as quantum and analogue physical beings. Due to quantum decoherence, reality beings can not but rarely experience actual telepathy. Entanglement happens all the time on all scales of the universe (that is this freaking property of entanglement that Einstein could not cope with). Still, it can not be perceived by bodies (and minds) that primarily belong to reality a couple of billion times more significant. But that difference in size does not exclude us from the quantum realm; it only limits our perception of its emergent properties.

Morality cannot be digitised

On the other side, the analogue side that belongs to the time-space realm of relativity, we see living bodies escaping from the digital world of 1 and 0, black and white. We live in all different shades of grey that can only be felt (not even digitally explained) as values. This is a realm of morality; on another side, ethics can be digitally described in algorithms. The specific power of human brains (we should say human phenotypes) does not lie in the small network architecture of brains since this is still digitally explainable but in categorical evasion from digital principles. Thus, we can never explain morality, neither democracy nor free will or music. This is also why quantum computing will not close the gap between computers and humans but widen it.

And there is another property of the time-space realm to take into consideration. It seems that time distorts in the presence of human body-mind presence as space distorts around objects in space. From a subjective point, this is observed as strange perceptual distortions when we feel time passing us sometimes faster and sometimes slower. From a more conceptual (philosophical) point of view, this is explained as there is no time as a fixed background entity.