Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Out of Body

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are often understood as experience of seeing oneself from a position outside of the body. OBEs are poorly understood in the framework of neuro science and pose a challenge for the reductionistic world view. I have found these experiences especially interesting test bed for TGD inspired theory of consciousness, not least for the reason that I have quite rich personal repertoire of them. Basic differences between TGD and Maxwell's ED is topological field quantization. Magnetic fields and radiation fields decompose to field quanta which correspond to space-time sheets with outer boundary. For instance, magnetic field decomposes to flux quanta. This means that one can assign to any system a definite field identity, magnetic body. In fact a hierarchy of this kind of bodies is predicted. Typically the size of the magnetic body is much larger than of material system or biological body. In TGD framework the notion of magnetic body provides an attractive starting point in attempts to understand what OBEs and related experiences are. The basic idea is that magnetic body serves effectively as a mirror defining a third person view as a cognitive representation also in ordinary wake-up state and that during OBEs this representation becomes sensory representation. Magnetic body need not always be a personal magnetic body but could correspond to a magnetic body receiving information from several brains (collective consciousness), magnetic body of another person, or be even associated with "dead" matter. The progress in identifying dark matter as a phase of matter with large value of Planck constant making possible macroscopic quantum coherence has led to the vision about dark matter at magnetic flux quanta as quantum controller of ordinary matter in living systems. The Bose-Einstein condensates of dark photons decaying via decoherence to ordinary photons mediate interactions between ordinary and dark matter and the hypothesis is that dark photon "laser" beams from body and brain reflected at magnetic flux quanta give rise to third person aspect of consciousness which in OBEs and related experiences are realized as sensory representations. The identification of bio-photons as end products of the de-coherence of dark photon beams is natural. The model leads also to a model for dreams, hallucinations, sensory feedback from brain to sensory organs, and directed attention. Concrete models for how dark photons can give rise to experiences in various sensory modalities such as vision, hearing, olfaction, and tactile senses, are proposed. For more details see the chapter TGD Based Model for OBEs.

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