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Why is the physical world experienced as external and the mental world experienced as internal?

[...] The physical world is res extensa, body with extension, and therefore subject to division. In other words, the physical world is distinguished by the division of micro and macro, the latter being conglomerates of the micro.

In the physical world, we do not have direct conscious access to the micro. We see the micro only with the amplifying help of the macro, the measuring-aid apparatuses. But there is a reward. Once the measurement is made and a particular pointer reading of the measurement apparatus has been chosen out of the myriad macro possibilities, the pointer does not run away, jumping on the train of quantum uncertainty. Its possibility waves are very sluggish, almost to the point of certainty, a certainty that can be shared by many observers. As a result, physical objects are experienced as parts of a shared reality, an external reality in awareness.

But the mind, res cogitans, is without extension, it is one thing. It is like the infinite medium of the physicist in which there can be waves, and thoughts are such waves. 

However there is no micro/macro distinction in the mental world. So we experience thoughts directly without the intermediary of amplifying apparatuses, but we pay a price. One price is that one person's experiencing a thought object effects the thought object due to the uncertainty principal, so that it is impossible (normally) for another person to experience the same thought object in an identical manner. Thoughts are private, thus experienced in awareness as internal.

The other price for the lack of micro/macro distinction in the realm of thought is that it is impossible to develop a tangled-heirarchical quantum-measurement apparatus. So mind can exist independent of the brain, but its movements can be registered and experienced in consciousness only when correlated with a physical brain.


—Amit Goswami
Quantum Doctor

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The Mouth of Krishna

Albarran Cabrera

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