Light Mind

Light Mind

I have a theory that is too beautiful not to be true. I will state the theory very simply to start with just so we can get our bearings. It is this: bodies are caused by matter, and minds are caused by light. More fully, the evolutionary explanation of the structure of animal bodies lies in the physical structure of planet Earth, while the evolutionary explanation of animal minds lies in the properties of light as it exists on Earth. As the biologists like to say, the primary driver of bodily evolution is the physical environment, while the primary driver of psychological evolution is the light environment. Minds result from light; bodies result from matter. This is a thesis in geo-genetics—the explanation of life characteristics in terms of planetary characteristics.[1]

We should first note that physicists often draw a sharp distinction between matter and radiation, and with good reason. Matter on Earth consists mainly of solid chunks of the stuff (as well as liquids and gases); land animals are surrounded by rocks as well as other animal and plant bodies with which they interact. These are discrete, made of atoms, subject to gravity, mobile, impactful, and of various shapes and sizes. This is the environment in which animal bodies must survive and reproduce. Their bodies must be adapted to this environment and be to some degree master of it. It’s no good if you can’t touch a rock without dying. Light by contrast is not solid, has no mass, is wavelike, of constant velocity, lacking in mechanical impact, composed of photons, and invariant in nature. It leaves no mark on you when it hits you.  Thus, there is a kind of physical dualism in the physics of the world—two sorts of basic stuff. Radiation and occupation, one might say. Naturally, these act differently on organisms: organisms bang into matter, but not into light; you don’t bleed from a stab of light. You can walk right through it. Light isn’t dangerous (heat is). Accordingly, the causal role of light and the causal role of matter are quite different in driving evolutionary development. The shape of a foot is determined by gravity, the local surface terrain, the motion of the attached animal, etc.; but the light falling on a foot does not contribute to its formation. Hands, likewise, are shaped by the material things they grasp and interact with, not by ambient light. On the other hand, light plays a role in the development of mind via the eyes: the visual mind is formed from the nature of light as it impinges on the photoreceptors. You see according to what the ambient light contains in the way of information as it impinges on the eyes. If the organism is unable to process such stimuli, it will not fare well in the fight to survive on a sun-drenched planet. Light is useful: its properties play a role in the evolution of minds, a crucial role. Minds exist to exploit the information contained in light; hands and feet don’t exist to exploit such information, but to act in mechanically advantageous ways. So the beautiful theory is in the business of contending.

You may object that the visual mind is not the whole mind, so light can’t be the complete story of mind. Here is where things get a bit complicated, but they don’t contradict the main thesis of the light theory. For that theory says only that light is the primary driver of mental evolution not the sole driver. Maybe pain came first, before eyes even existed (about 500 million years ago), but eyes were a very significant step forward in the evolution of the conscious mind; they enabled organisms to exist that don’t just float and filter-feed but move of their own volition and actively seek food (including other organisms). The presence of eyes characterizes nearly all life as we know it—almost any animal that lives its life in the light. This is a commonplace among evolutionary biologists. Thus, we read: “The mind, in a very physical sense, is an engine built to decode light”; “Ultimately, while the mind requires other variables in order to exist—such as gravity, touch, and chemistry—it was the ancient necessity of navigating a world bathed in sunlight that forced simple nervous systems into complex self-aware minds”.[2] Without light minds would be much poorer things, hardly minds at all. If the Earth had been dark, there would have been no minds to speak of. We therefore have the light theory of terrestrial minds and the matter theory of terrestrial bodies—a pleasing duality.

If this is so, we can expect to find some commonality between matter and bodies and light and minds. Not identity, to be sure, but signs of origin and consequence. Can we infer one from the other? In the case of the body, this does not seem difficult: the body has just the features its environment would suggest, since it is adapted to that environment. In the case of the mind, matters are less straightforward, because the mind is such a peculiar thing; but there are some impressionistic things we can say. First, the mind, especially consciousness, is inherently active, like light—which is never at rest but always moving (at top speed). Second, the mind has a continuous quality, like perceived light; it doesn’t come in discrete packets (phenomenologically). Both are impalpable. Third, consciousness can be switched on or off, like light (and unlike matter). The dualism of the physical world is recapitulated (mirrored) in the dualism of the organic world. Bodies are a distorted imprint of the physical environment, and minds are similarly reflective of the world of light (this is why we use “see” so freely of the mind). You might think that light is less complex than the physical environment, so less able to drive complexity in the mind; but that is not so clear when you consider all the ways light can behave–brightness, shadow, light and shade, colors, etc. Vision is clearly central to the minds of many species, and light in all its variety is its stimulus; the seeing mind must handle this complexity. The reason is that light contains information, and information is vital to survival in advanced organisms. Light needs its own responsive organ; the mind is that organ, among other things. It is light that makes organisms have the minds they have not gravity or sounds or smells or collisions.

What caused human language—light or matter? I think both: matter played a role in the segmentation of language, its subject-predicate structure, and its vocal medium; but light also played a role in that light conveys information about the perceived world. Language needs the world of matter and the world of light in order to get off the ground. It needs the mind that was made possible by light and the surrounding material world itself (the world language is about). Language thus falls between bodies and minds geo-genetically, a kind of hybrid of the two. It doesn’t spring miraculously from nowhere. It has a complex causal evolutionary history rooted in the physics of planet Earth.

What, then, is the mind in the light (!) of these considerations? It is certainly not identical to light itself or made of light; it needs the matter of the brain too. It is matter as shaped by light, because light caused brains to be constructed as they are—specifically, the visual cortex. If you combine matter with light in the way evolution does, you get minds—how, we don’t know. It is possible, scientists tell us, that light created the neuron, as opposed to other types of cells–in which case light created the brains of sighted creatures and any creatures whose brain is made of neurons. Then the causal history of all existing brains would include light as well as matter. Light certainly created visual brains and visual experience (but not kidneys and hearts). Evolution owes a lot to light, despite its lightness of being. Light led the way.[3]

[1] See my “A Causal Theory of Everything”.

[2] I came across these two statements by conducting a simple AI search. I was surprised to find such forthright statements, indicating that the theory I was toying with already had numerous supporters in evolutionary science. Evolution went from mindless primitive organisms with eyespots and opsin to the advanced camera eyes and minds that we see today. That would not be possible without the inner intricacies of light.

[3] The physics of light lies behind the evolutionary production of consciousness, though opaquely, mysteriously. It is almost as if this is what light is for; in reality, it is a kind of cosmic coincidence. Still, poetically, it seems fitting that light is what lit the way to the mind in all its glory—to a conscious universe. The origin of species, as we know them, owes a lot to the strange physics of light—massless particles travelling uniformly at maximum velocity. Light is what led in the fullness of time to enlightenment—science, art, morality, philosophy. Light is mighty. It is a kind of natural miracle in itself as well as being the seed that gave birth to mind. The closest thing we have to God perhaps (“Let there be light!”).