If the reader is not that likely to want to get to grips with the more technical explanation of the mechanisms behind mind and memory, then it might be easier and diverting to start with the Narrative account in section H below. My approach to this impossibly complex problem was instigated developed in 1977 at a time when I had no such intellectual ambitions. I fell effortlessly into the subject completely by chance, leading to an unorthodox approach. This was later suddenly encouraged in 1981 by a similar thesis published by an academic scientist whose book became a best seller..

This website puts forward a hypothesis, or possibly model is a better word, for the way in which information is carried across both time and space. I call it Duplication Theory because, firstly, it is less of a mouthful than hypothesis, and secondly, when I completed a first rough draft in 1979, I was not aware that it was more a hypothesis rather than a theory. My explanations are generally in the first person singular since any hypothesis on such an ambitious scale has to be based on conjectures which are necessarily very subjective. My prime interest is to provide an explanation for the mechanism of memory since if this was once achieved then many other imponderables of the mind’s workings would fall into place. I am also aware that although major advances have been made in the understanding of the rules of nature by the physicists, the cleverest people in the world, yet nobody has yet managed to put up an explanation of the operation of memory in any convincing detail.

I use principles of physics in the development of my thesis but I have had to make a number of assumptions in building up my arguments which will be new or unacceptable to many experts, but in doing so an explanation for memory results. The proposals involved give rise to a principle of how form and order increase: negative entropy in short. But then if these assumptions are made, a basis of explanation transpires not only for memory but also for a number of other allied phenomena such as intuition, self consciousness, the significance of ritual and group behaviour, and some other seemingly disconnected phenomena.

I have summarised Duplication Theory in two basic sections below, the first dealing with the correlation, or transfer of information over time, and the second is a corollary description of how action and/or information is transmitted over distance as simultaneously as light speed allows. Both summaries will obviously require much clarification in detail in subsequent sections.

If the reader finds the following hard going or tedious, then there has been published since May 2016 an alternative means of explanation of the principles involved in Duplication Theory in the form of a novel available on Amazon in paperback or on kindle: ‘Mind out of Time’ by Nick Greaves. The first part is thinly disguised personal experience which is not that much different from section H below (Narrative account). This explains in dialogue form the principle of the theory, and some of its applications but which should be more diverting and even amusing to read. The second part demonstrates how the theory is proved successful by experiment and the staggering anticipated results. It is fiction of course, but somebody has to come up with an answer to the mechanisms behind mind and memory, which modern scientific method has signally failed to do to date.

Later Comment December 2021

Some of the conclusions I described tentatively in the novel on the results of the experiment around which the plot revolves, I now realise are infeasible and most probably incorrect, given my later take on certain aspects of reality that appear to have become clearer to me. However this has been described in a book that I published on Amazon in February 2020: ‘Mind, Memory and Quantum Entanglement’ (see below for more detail).

GENERAL SUMMARY

1. That the creation of form and order out of chaos is no more than the repetition of similar intervals in space is pretty much self evident, but why this should be so seems to have been little considered. The theory is based on an analysis of the significance of this duplication process.
2. The theory shows, from an implication of the Uncertainty Principle, how a specific structure, changing its shape over time, will tend to resonate with a later similar structure in the same or a similar location, so the later will move its component particles to duplicate the motions of the earlier. Thus it is possible to transport information through time via a system of resonance.
3. If huge numbers of similar intervals in time rather than space are considered, effectively series of identical actions or events, then the same analysis explains the resonance of these repeated events through space, otherwise familiar as electromagnetic radiation
4. The theory can be summarised in two sections thus:
   Equal intervals in time, similar actions, tend to duplicate themselves through all space at one moment in time (this statement is no more than the familiar transmission of radio waves); and
   Equal intervals in space, similar structures, tend to duplicate themselves through all time in one location (or rather the same location in relative terms, an effect not yet countenanced by established science). It is significant that each is a direct corollary of the other, the words space and time being interchangeable.
5. Conclusions derived from such observations indicate there is an ordering process in nature, to counterbalance that of entropy. This is manifested by the escalation of orderly structures which become more complex as time passes. This negative entropy is the basis of life and other phenomena associated with increasing complexity.
6. The theory leads to a basis of explanation for a number of phenomena, amongst which are the mechanisms of memory and many aspects of the nature of thought, as well as the way in which life evolves. It has implications for the understanding of inertia and the possibility that the universe is bounded and finite; that the velocity of light is variable and mediated by that of the rate of expansion of the universe.

The rationale for memory is based on the assumption that long term eidetic memory, or the ability of perfect recollection, is not only possible (most notably in trance state) but is a crucial element of the function of memory. In other words, every thing experienced by the brain of one individual in the past, should be capable of being duplicated later by identical structures of firing synapses in that brain to to mirror and reproduce exactly those earlier experiences.

This involves a process of quantum correlation over time, based on the capacity for such synapses to momentarily fire close as possible to absolute randomness as part of the process. This will trigger sequences of recollection by resonance with the structures emanating from the firings of those earlier the synapses. An explanation in more detail will be covered in more detail in later sections.

One half of the theory demonstrates a new concept of how a specific structure which changes its shape over time, will tend to resonate with a later similar structure in the same location, so that the structure of the later object will move its component particles to duplicate the motions of the earlier structure. Thus it is possible to correlate information through time by a system of resonance, a process not yet countenanced by current science other than in some esoteric effects of quantum physics.

Erwin Schrödinger’s short book “What is Life” which together with his similar booklet ‘Mind and Matter’, anticipates Duplication Theory remarkably well. The following extract seeks to explain, that there must be a tendency or potential to organise matter into complex structures, to counter entropy.

‘It appears that there are two different ‘mechanisms’ by which orderly events can be produced: the ‘statistical mechanism’, which produces ‘Order from disorder’, and the new one, producing ‘order from order’. To the unprejudiced mind, the second principle appears to be much simpler, much more plausible. No doubt it is. That is why the physicists were so proud to have fallen in with the other one, the ‘Order from disorder’ principle, which is actually followed in nature and which alone conveys an understanding of the great line of natural events, in the first place of their irreversibility. But we cannot expect that the ‘Laws of Physics’ derived from it suffice straightaway to explain the behaviour of living matter, whose most striking features are visibly based to a large extent on the ‘Order from Order’ principle. We must therefore not be discouraged by the difficulty of interpreting life by the ordinary laws of physics. For that is just what is to be expected from the knowledge we have gained of the structure of living matter. We must be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in it. Or, are we to term it a non-physical, not to say a super physical law? No, I do not think that. For the new principle that is involved is a genuinely physical one: it is in my opinion, nothing more else than the principle of quantum theory over again. To explain this, we have to go to some length including a refinement, not to say an amendment, of an assertion previously made, namely, that all physical laws are based on statistics.’

If an ‘order from order’ principle could be derived, it would at once become a fundamental paradigm to explain the phenomenon of life, although that is not the particular problem I first sought to explain. The problem that I sought to resolve was that of the mechanism behind memory, although it later transpired that the two are closely connected.