In the beginning was the Word. This was an early human story describing how nature came into being. Science seeks to discover the truth in nature. Will science find God?

Scientists are now beginning to seriously ask questions like: "Does Mathematics exist independently of Human thought?" "Is Mathematics invented or discovered?"

I have contended that Mathematics is one of the oldest, universal, 'naturally-evolved' human languages -- computer languages being 'artificial', but not entirely unrelated.

I have long characterized my mathematical sculpture as the "concretization of abstract, mathematical language". It is the Word made flesh.

In Clifford Pickover's "The Loom of God" (Plenum, April, 1997. ISBN 0-306-45411-4) chapter 20 is devoted to "Mathematical Proofs of God's Existence".

I find the beginning assumptions in all the logical proofs fundamentally unsatisfying. I believe it is best to add an empirical view.

Let us begin with a physically-based (Creation-based?) definition:

[1] God is the set of rules by which the Universe came into being.

God is the fundamental principle of quantum physics by which an electron-positron pair will spontaneously generate in a total vacuum. God is the quantum-dynamic eddy current which will divide the waters and bring into being matter and energy from the void. The same principles are also invoked in cosmological theories on the origin of the universe.

These physical principles seem to be mathematically consistent and empirically provable, albeit not yet complete. The fact is that the mathematical consistency describing the nature of the universe is so compelling as to indicate that Mathematics is itself an attribute of the natural universe. God by this definition seems provable in principle.

Given [1], God is also the set of meta-complexities, proceeding from and built upon fundamental quantum-dynamics, which eventually brought into being ourselves -- creatures of sentient consciousness.

From "Teddy" by J.D. Salinger:

"I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all," Teddy said. "It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was only a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean."

[2] Let sentient consciousness be an attribute of God. The sensation of self-existence. A conscious God seems to be a thing people would like to prove. It is the verification that humans were created in God's image.

Proving the existence of a general model of consciousness, which is God, is a bit more trouble, primarily because we have no objective standard or example of what consciousness is, besides ourselves. We don't know a consciousness greater than or even different from ourselves.

We imagine that dolphins and whales might be 'smarter' than we are, but dolphins are not equipped with hands to physically express their consciousness.

Dolphin communication seems to me to be so deeply encoded in the unique physiology of dolphin aural sensation, that we would need a working, physical model of a dolphin brain and consciousness in order to decode what they are really saying.

We are the most complex entities we know.

My idea for building a model of consciousness proceeds from a superposition of Bela Julesz' Hologrammic theory of memory and stereopsis upon Roger Penrose' Quantum Computational Graviton (QCG) theory of consciousness. (Bela Julesz, "Foundations of Cyclopean Perception"; 1971, University of Chicago Press)

(Roger Penrose, "The Emperor's New Mind"; Oxford University Press.)

Penrose puts forth a theory whereby consciousness emerges through a linear superposition of neuron firings in phase space, until the result achieves the potential of one quantum graviton. I believe that in order to understand how consciousness emerges, it is useful to refer to Bela Julesz' hologrammic theory of vision and memory.

Professor Penrose does not mention Julesz in his book, but I believe Julesz is fundamental to understanding how the sensation of consciousness emerges from the brain.

According to Julesz, two disparate images from our eyes are fused into the sensation of a 3-D space via a hologrammic phase coherence in the neural field of the visual cortex. Julesz proved this statistically by the use of random-dot stereograms. I believe this work provides some foundation for the statistical questions of CQG "computation" which Penrose found troubling.

In the hologrammic theory of memory, all other sensations and memories are stored as similar "neural interference (phase reinforcement/cancellation) fringe patterns", which are stored in neural tissue and decoded as they become coherent in "neural phase space".

I believe that all multi-modal memories are recorded as hologrammic neural phase states. The sensation of "deja-vu" is a prime example: It is the experience of a multi-modal neural phase state similar enough to that of a familiar, pleasurable memory, that it triggers a "near-hit" on that memory. It is a vague feeling of "I've been in this multi-modal sensory state before", which we express as "I've been here before".

Regarding Mozart's perception of time in music composition: I believe it is the holographic storage of memory which allows the music to be laid out "spatially" as a "temporal tonal connotation map" built up of "sensation memory" building blocks.

It is the superposition of Penrose' Quantum Graviton computational phase space on top of hologrammic "neural phase space" which provides a more complete picture of the sensation of consciousness emerging from the mind/brain as a "quantum computer".

A hologrammic computer is a vastly different concept from a Von Neumann or a Turing machine. To correctly understand consciousness, I believe it will be necessary to establish a model of hologrammic computing.

If neural firings are really quantum events -- which Penrose leaves unanswered -- then these might be our spiritual connection to the universal quantum continuum -- to God.

(c) 2000 Stewart Dickson