Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of modern life is its specialization. There are as many hobbies as individuals to pursue them, as many different products as citizens to purchase them, as many job descriptions as employees to practice them, as many working financial models as successful businesses, and as many subcultures as can be realized. The sectors of society, to the extent that they are logistical, orient around maxing out the mind’s capacity for encompassing existence’s diversity, stretching the boundaries of thought towards assimilating as much information as possible, and differentiating our modes of behavior to any extent which proves practical for furthering the cause. Human industriousness generates so much data that the quantity of connections between internet links will soon exceed the hundred trillion synaptic connections in a human brain. …

Sketch 1:

Pilot wave theory envisions matter as consisting in particles whose paths of motion are guided by supradimensional waves. Collapse models describe particles as resulting from mechanisms of condensation within a global wave. Can we combine the idea of supradimensional waves with that of particularization as a concentrated wave to derive an image of reality adequately represented by the square of the wave function?

Imagine a topographical map with waves flowing as peaks and valleys. Think of this as the architecture of our spacetime universe, the mutating square of the wave function. As waves travel around and contours morph, masses and velocities change in complex patterns, with mass and velocity represented according to some standardization as horizontal and vertical position respectively. …

Etiologies of early humans were mythical, the world populated by spiritual entities, including humans who used spells, incantations, ritualized acts of all sorts to summon, supplicate and grapple with causality from out of mystical ideation and a mechanistic ignorance punctuated by technical insight into the solution of practical difficulties. A human being could adroitly design a hunting spear and at the same time believe supernatural spirits determined one’s fate in every venture. …

1. Mating and Birthing

The function of mating and birthing is obviously reproduction, sustaining the existence of an organism’s species and passing along traits that made reproduction possible. It is easy to see the kind of advantage reproduction enables: a nonreplicating bacterium can be outnumbered one to a million in less than a day. The eukaryotic (multi-celled) lineage evolved its structural template via three stages of symbiosis indicated by the relatedness of microorganism lineages to eukaryote genetic material. First, a single-celled organism from phylum Archaea with a particularly efficient genetic system was engulfed by another prokaryote, becoming the nucleus. Then bacteria efficient at metabolizing sugar were incorporated, evolving into mitochondria. Finally, cyanobacteria capable of photosynthesis, the harnessing of light energy to produce sugar, were subsumed, the origin of chloroplasts. …

a. The history of genetics

At the end of the last ice age, roughly 10,000 B.C.E., humans began intensively cultivating plants into crops and domesticating animals. Agriculture and livestock breeding selected a modest set of desirable traits such as caloric content, palatability and medicinal value, while animal husbandry improved strength, stamina, appearance and behavioral profile in dogs, cats and additional quadrupeds for purposes such as companionship, packing, herding, guarding, tracking, retrieving and aesthetic form. Since this selective breeding took place over many millennia, general trends were not examined with any comprehensiveness or much integration until life science commitments began to mature in the 19th century, at which time biology expanded into a discipline with the breadth of systematic observation and a scientific methodology sufficient to approach organic phenomena as well-defined mechanisms in the context of progressing generalization, what had come to be called ‘theory’. …

a. The concept of biological evolution

‘Evolution’ in biology is a general term for the understanding we have of how reproduction in organic life works. The core insight, obvious enough to be almost instinctive, is that offspring are related to their parents, and traits of lineages can be selected for, mixed and matched predictably, on purpose by mating choices. Saying it is one thing and comprehending it a different ballpark entirely, moving up to the major leagues so to speak. We of course have engaged in selective breeding for millennia, often at the expense of quality of life and adaptability of the organism, inducing dysfunctions such as a pinched spinal column, itchy skin, stupidity or sterility (in addition to many strains that have clearly been augmented and which might even concur if they could converse and learn our methods). At the same time, we select our own mates based on more intuitional priorities, such as dependability of our partner as a fellow parent, opportunities available to offspring, status in the social group including intrasex status, even pure pleasure, with all the nuances that transcend trait prediction. …

As psychology and neuroscience progress, theory rapidly expands in its capacity to model and predict mental phenomena, but while practical for the field of medical treatment and instructive as we attempt to make our knowledge of the world and our place in it more profound, this growth in mechanistic explanations has only deepened the mystery surrounding interiors of consciousness. Philosophy has termed components of this internal domain ‘qualia’, the perceptual elements or qualitative contents of experience as contrasted with conventionally physical matter, and they have proven highly intractable to rational analysis, even the rigorous empiricism of science. Why is the brown color of a table brown and not simply a light wave, why is thought not merely synapsing neurons and nothing more, what is this supramaterial substance of consciousness that scientific instruments seem unable to detect and to which all our mechanistic theorizing has traditionally been incapable of adding, even when individuals can report these occurrences to each other so casually that we do not even have to think about them in the majority of circumstances? …

a. Psychology

Understanding of cognition began with psychogenic theories derived from psychoanalysis — observation and study of mental associations made by patients during conversations with a psychological practitioner. It was found that maladaptive abnormalities in the psyche, what the medical field termed ‘neurosis’, could be linked to repression of thoughts and memories hidden under ordinary conditions, but evinced during therapeutic sessions as pauses, slips of the tongue, sudden or surprising personal insights, flare-ups of emotional disorders such as numbness and agitation, as well as dramatic descents into irrationality called ‘hysteria’. Under careful investigation, repression proved to be so common, even in healthy individuals, that it led to a foundational concept called the ‘unconscious’, referring to a portion of the psyche which stores memories of experiences below the threshold of a patient’s self-awareness. …