The Origin

"Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it"

In the relative quiet of these days, I find that I have a few more things to say before I am willing to consider this particular blogo-venture complete.

Among all the questions that demand answers from this way of modelling reality, one question I find particularly intriguing is the question of our entry into this experience. What we were/are (if anything) before entering human consciousness is of less concern to me than the questions about where and how the beginning of the trajectory of our consciousness is determined. Of course, without a more-complete understanding of the nature of consciousness, these questions cannot be answered with certainty, but they are worth examining nonetheless.

For example... At what point is the substrate of our consciousness advanced enough to act as an agent in the selection of outcomes? I am reminded of a study on baby chicks and other animals that were able to influence a random number generator so that target systems behaved in a way that benefited the animals. This suggests that even a human infant's consciousness may play some role in the selection of states. Could a fetus similarly impact a randomly-controlled system, provided it were able to interact with such a system? At what age could a fetus begin to exert an independent effect upon such a system?

Along the same lines, one might ask any number of questions about the optimal conditions of consciousness (COC) from which a noticeable influence upon random system might be obtained. Answering any of these questions requires, of course, that the question of multiple observers be settled definitively. (For what it's worth, and though it may leave me vulnerable to charges of ignoring a competing hypothesis, I believe, for various reasons, that the final model must be one that describes and accounts for multiple-observer interactions.) If our experience of this universe is a culmination of the effects of multiple observers, then our individual ability to choose outcomes may be severely limited at points of suboptimal COC.

There is a question of time as well. A 5-dimensional model is expected to exhibit signs of 'time' flowing in both directions. Does influence in the process of state selection flow into the past as well as into the subjective future? Can all that is significant to a single consciousness during its duration be derived from parsing a bi-directional temporal flow of influence? (This would be the best way to demonstrate the validity of the solipsistic perspective.)

And in considering the ultimate question of origin, it is amazing to me that more hasn't been said about how influence flowing backwards in time may play the leading role in determining how the conditions for this universe and our entry into it were created/selected...