Let us start with a question: What principle unifies digital records (CD records) with old analog LP records? Which formula, which principle unifies the “old” analog world with the “new” digital world?

Digital waves?

There is a wave inscribed in an analog LP that resembles a wave of sound so that we “understand” the transition from the vinyl via a needle through wires and amplifiers to speakers. Both the vinyl and the sound play with the wave in one or another way. What, on the other hand, is inscribed in a CD ( or, for the same matter, on a hard computer drive), that could be linked to a wave and then to a sound that speakers finally produce? Can there be some common denominator, some “god particle” that would explain both? If such a »particle« exists, it should be placed hierarchically higher than a wave and a digit separately.  Such a “god particle” would be a common denominator of both. What could it be?

Vinyl CD?

I used the word “god particle” for a specific reason. The press gave such a name to the Higgs boson, for it was supposed to unify quantum and relativity laws, digital particles defined by electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear forces with analog gravity. Since the Higgs field (a better term than particle) was a missing link for particles to have mass, it was assumed that we have come to gravity after the mass is explained there. While the Higgs boson made the Standard model closer to general acceptance, it made nothing to integrate the Standard model with the theory of relativity. As I have claimed in the previous post, there is no foreseeable solution for this schism.

Nevertheless, let me speculate about what unifies vinyl with CD.

Unattainable singularity

What is essential to bear in mind is that physical singularity could be explained with a bit of help from music. Do not we say that music immerses us in ourselves and can simultaneously not be explained? Music singularizes us and can not be explained.

No wonder music was the highest philosophical property for Plato (and not only for him). I do not want to say that there was only music at the moment of the Big Bang (initial physical singularity) and nothing else. I want to say that for every duality of the physical world, there is one singularity that the language of the former two cannot explain. (Who says Kurt Gödel’s famous theorem cannot be applied to everyday life!) By the same token, a singularity that unifies mind and body exists, expressed as music but not only as music. All this was explained already by Buddhist philosophy, for example, with the concept of mindfulness (a Buddhist notion of contemporary science’s singularity found in black holes or within the Big Bang).

Another example, Big Bounce or Bounce theory, states that the Big Bang did not start our world, but that the “previous world” collapsed in a singularity and bounced to a present state with inflation. You can not explain singularity in this “bouncing” Big Bang moment with the vocabulary of either this or the previous world. And with vocabulary, I mean all physics, chemistry, language, and… that was and will be developed until the next big bounce.

Music as singularity

Music can be explained neither by digits nor waves; consciousness (self) can be explained neither by genes nor memes… If anything is found in physics that will unify quantum with relativity world, mind with body, or digital with analog, it will not resemble boson but music.

The human mind as music

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

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

Telepathy

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

Negative proof is the inability of computers to penetrate our minds. To be digital, or even to be quantum, is not enough to penetrate human minds or human consciousness. It is this inseparable duality of mind that makes it a mind, and it is this duality that cannot be reached by creatures without phenotypes, arms, and legs.

It is no longer a 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 the decoherence of quantum reality, beings cannot 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 cannot be perceived by bodies (and minds) that primarily belong to a reality a couple of billion times larger. However, that difference in size does not exclude us from the quantum realm; it only limits our perception of its emergent properties.

Morality

But then, from the analogue side that belongs to the time-space realm of relativity, we clearly see living bodies as escaping from the digital world of 1 and 0, of black and white. We live in all different shades of grey, which can only be felt (not even digitally explained) as values. This is a realm of morality. On the other hand, there is ethics, which 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 either morality, democracy, 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 the human body-mind presence, as much as space distorts around objects. The gravity of body/mind objects distorts time. From a subjective point of view, 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 the absence of time as a fixed background entity.

A sort of conclusion

As much as quantum reality is particle and wave-like (explained by the Schrödinger equation of fields), the mind, with the memetic emergence, exists in a digital-analog duality.

The consequences of this duality are perplexing, as Sean Carroll explains in his books Something Deeply Hidden, Quanta and Fields, and The Many Hidden Worlds of Quantum Mechanics. They all stem from how the physical reality that we observe emerges from the quantum reality of probabilities, localized only after being observed, after the wave function collapses. We can never see both sides of this duality at the same time.

This post does not aim to rationalize further about the cecrates of quantum reality and its relation to our world, for that would be overly ambitious. However, it can be said that we experience (to experience does not mean to understand) this duality holistically, as a sort of continuum, as something absolute, like music.

This is the fifth edition of the post written in November 2012. It is partly abused in Homonism, yet as time passes, new insights are also included in 2025.