There are three possibilities:
- Mind Emergent. This theory postulates that mind emerged as a new entity from the complexity of the brain, after some limit of complexity was reached. Mind is seen as a product of Matter.
- Mind Immanent. This theory suggests that Mind is always present in all living beings, though in different degrees of “lucidity”. (Gregory Bateson.) Perhaps Mind or living spirits are also in rocks, mountains, and lakes. (Animist religions.) Mind is seen as coeval with Matter, a second essence.
- Mind Transcendent. This idea postulates that, while Mind resides in all of nature, as suggested above, it also transcends nature, as a free-standing entity. Mind exists in the eternal order as well as in the temporal order. Mind is seen as the Spirit of God hovering over nature.
These may not be alternative theories between which we must choose. If Mind Immanent is accepted as a vague internal awareness of all parts of nature, becoming stronger and clearer in living beings as they ascend the evolutionary scale, then Mind Emergent is seen as the clear expression of general Mind, becoming more explicit and self-aware in humans. Then Mind Emergent would be a special case of Mind Immanent. If we use a narrow definition of Mind, we will accept theory li if we choose a broader definition, we will prefer theory 2.
The link to Mind Transcendent requires the further concept of the non-transitive “great wrap-around”, symbolized by the image of the Uroborus, the snake eating its own tail. This is a super-cycle: -in short, we create God as the Omega-point of Teilhard de Chardin, while God creates us in the traditional sense. Such super-cycles are possible in the eternal order, where time is only a dimension like space (as in the theory of special relativity). Thus Mind, which is a God-essence or “ousis”, emerges from physical structures like the brain of living beings originating in God-essence in the first place. Cycles in nature in the temporal order would require energy to drive them (solar energy on earth), because perpetual-motion machines are impossible here. But in the eternal order, this restriction is removed, because time, the determining factor in thermodynamics, does not exist as such in the eternal order.
Another useful image is the three-spheres model of Roger Penrose: the Platonic sphere of pure ideas (including mathematics) injects part of its contents into the physical sphere, which is why the laws of physics can be expressed in elegant, beautiful mathematical forms; the physical sphere then injects part of its contents into the mental sphere, via the initiation and evolution of life and then the brain; and finally the mental sphere devotes parts of its contents to developing abstract ideas (including mathematics), and injects these to the Platonic sphere.
The Penrose model is intransitive: A is greater than B, B is greater than C, but c is greater than A. How is this possible? Somewhat as in the children’s game “scissors paper-stone”: scissors cut paper, `paper wraps stone, stone breaks scissors. Each is more powerful than the next, in a cycle, but the verb changes. This is the essenpe of the “great wrap-around”, so difficult to explain.
Platonic into physical = mind immanent
Physical into mental = mind emergent
Mental into Platonic = mind transcendent
In trigonometry, if we plot tan x against x, we see a jump in the function from plus infinity to minus infinity. Presumably they meet somewhere beyond our conventional space dimensions. In a similar sense, the infinitely hot can be seen as the infinitely cold (absolute zero) in the theory of magnetic alignments. Things which our commonsense sees as sharply discontinuous, even opposite, can merge in a reality beyond our comprehension.
Why should we think that we can understand everything through reason? A physicist once said “The world is not only stranger than we think, it is stranger than we CAN `think.” Our brain evolved to help our survival, not to understand ultimate reality – though we have that capacity to a limited extent as a by-product.
A strip of paper has two sides – right? Wrong! If it is cut, given a single twist and glued back together, it forms a Moebius strip with only one surface. Two opposite sides can be “reconciled” by this simple method; so can seemingly opposite theories. The two sides of a coin are different, but they are part of the same coin. And so Mind Transcendent can form a higher unity with Mind Immanent and Mind Emergent. We do not have to choose.