Joni Mitchell in her song “Clouds” sings that she has “seen the clouds from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow it’s clouds’ illusions I recall, I really don’t know clouds at all”. And she has the same feelings about love and about life.

According to Sperry (see previous essay), the mind is an emergent entity arising from a holistic integration of brain function and structure. An emergent entity is a new thing in the universe, something that never existed before, that which makes a whole or a system more than the sum of its parts, and that is in a sense “higher” than the component parts and can exert causal effects on them.

According to Paul Devereux, the mind is not a brain product at all, either emergent (higher) or epiphenomenal (coincidental and irrelevant). The mind is “outside the skull”, using the brain as an instrument (television screen cum interactive computer) to perceive the world through the senses and then to act on the world through the muscles. It is God’s peephole on the world, and thus “atman is brahman”, our consciousness is that small fragment of the Godhead which is using our particular bodily apparatus for its own purposes, unless we obstruct it through sin or ignorance.

Both these views are attractive and plausible, but not the same, nor at first glance compatible. There is no empirical evidence for either, so this cannot be the basis for choosing between them. Yet maybe complementarity operates, as part of the “Ultimate Wrap-around” of which I spoke elsewhere.

What if the brain (ie. the body) created the mind by creating a system of sufficient complexity to give rise to an emergent entity, as Sperry would have it, and then in turn many minds merged (or will merge in non-temporal eternity) into Teilhard’s Omega Point which is the Godhead, and this Supermind in turn creates the bodily apparatuses through which it can act on the world through multiple channels?

“I’ve seen the mind from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow, it’s mind’s illusions I recall, I really don’t know Mind at all.”