Michael,
I’m not necessarily comfortable with simply proposing it as energy either. The logical connection is with the point about time.
It goes to the heart of a lot of issues, from determinism versus the power of will, to why it is present, but only evident through inference. Yet those are all issues addressed in pulling apart the question of time.
We like to think of consciousness as focused attention and cognitive thinking, but energy is also only ordered by how it manifests, so those who have spent their lives studying tend to see consciousness only in the mental constructs, or as neutral presence. These are people who have done their best to cool the raw passions, in order to see the details, so the dynamism isn’t front and center, as it might be to a teenager. There is just no immediate connection between what is considered energy and this state of awareness, in the details science looks at, other than a view of time that they currently don’t hold.
Yet when we think of time, not as the point of the present, moving past to future, but change turning future to past, it is the same relationship between energy and the forms it expresses, as between consciousness and thoughts. They go opposite directions of time. That is not in any physics text book, or even popular science book.
The fact is that even the most brilliant scientists don’t distinguish between energy and form. Waves are seen as energy, not as the shape of energy. Yet they go opposite directions of time.
Like individual lives go from being in the future to being in the past, birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old, past to future.
Similarly they don’t distinguish between consciousness and perceptions. Though one is observer and the other is observation.
Theoretical physics is in a bit of a quandary, as it is becoming evident their current models are dead ends, but human psychology suggests they will not look outside the discipline for answers. One way I’ve tried going around this is through neuroscience, because it is dealing directly with consciousness and tends to be a little more open to ideas other than just mathematical formulae.
Once, way back in the 90’s, the local talk show had a neurologist on from Johns Hopkins, talking about the relationship of the mind to the brain and I called in and happened to get through. The argument I made was that if two billiard balls strike one another, it creates an event. Yet while the event fades into the past, the balls continue onto future events. I pointed out the mind is about the events, while the brain, being physical, like the balls, continues into other events. His initial reaction was, “Wow, that’s deep!” Then he started to explain how physics has shown that time is actually a dimension, similar to space, when the host cut us off and went onto the next caller.
It goes to show the influence theoretical physics has over the other sciences, but I can only imagine that with all the talk of multiworlds, multiverses and post empirical science, that this respect is starting to be undermined. So I think the cracks in the paradigm have to explored from various directions.
