God Is a Porcupine—Brain, Consciousness and Spacetime Physics

Abstract

Whereas the human body requires a vast numbers of atoms to maintain its intricate anatomical functions, we assert that the human brain requires “something extra” to carry out its higher mental and emotional functions. Recently, neuroscientists are beginning to suspect brain cells are not fast enough, or intricate enough, to correlate complex spatiotemporal information into cognitive understanding. They conclude that spacetime fields may be necessary to assist the brain during neurological processing—in much the same way magnetic and electric fields are essential for the propagation of light. This “something extra,” we argue, is spacetime itself—where structures in the brain, called facilitators ( somewhat like Descartes pineal gland ), have evolved biologically in such a way, so as to be able to store and retrieve spacetime quanta for the formation and generation of consciousness and memory. In this way, cognition is not a thing complete. Rather it is emergent, and accumulates as discretized spacetime quanta in the brain so rapidly, we perceive our own awareness to be continuous, events spontaneous. In this paper, we consider spacetime to be a field ( like all quantum fields ), which can be excited into quanta particles called gravitons. We then apply this quanta excitation to help explain the brain’s cognitive processes. If the brain has indeed evolved to interact with discretized spacetime, then with the advent of improved functional imaging equipment, we might be able to map detailed correlations between neural processes, conscious experience and spacetime. In so doing, it might be possible to learn more about the fundamental workings of spacetime itself.