A. APOLOGY AND INTRODUCTION

The objective of this website is nothing if not ambitious. It is to show that there is a basic hypothesis underpinning memory and the process of thought that has yet not been recognised or in many cases even perceived by established science. This is done by explaining the mechanism involved in terms of principles of physics without resort to mathematics or a background based on study of the life sciences. If the reader is wary of long introductions and apprehensive of long drawn out scientific arguments which might be hard to follow (even though there is no mathematics involved), then that reader could do worse than immediately going straight to section G. which is the narrative account of the way in which the theory was developed over a number of years in a surprisingly haphazard and unlikley manner and what I was doing at the time that led me to those conclusions. I have always found such personal accounts by far the most sympathetic and easy to understand than their formal presentations in scientific papers.

The hypothesis has further applications to a number of other phenomena, the mechanism of reproductive life being one of them.  Laying claim to such ambitions is enough for any professional scientist to at once consider that their originator must be suffering from hubris at best but most likely to be one of the great number of cranks who spend much of their time wondering about the mysteries of the mind yet to be deciphered by science. That there are more of these than most people might realise is a problem for someone such as myself who can only expect to be consigned to their ranks of the great deluded for even making a claim to have cracked just a tiny part of the problem. But if this hypothesis even claims to come up with some possibly viable answers to the above perennial problems (memory, thought and life), answers which have been abortively sought for at least five thousand years, then at once consignment to the sphere of the unhinged is almost automatic.

The trouble is that not only do I come up with fairly specific answers to these three great imponderables but it transpires, mirabile dictu, that the basic hypothesis can be shown to have far reaching implications for a number of other mechanisms involved in nature. These were almost embarrassing in their prolixity, especially as I knew little about them initially but the connection was so apparent that I could not forbear to delve into such possibilities and draw them out a little. But this is even less helpful when it comes to initial credibility, because the professional specialist in the mind's operation and other scientists will at once be deterred by the claim of a universal panacea and answer for all unknowns. Well quite, but it would be pusillanimous to ignore such widespread connections and implications, even though initially such further explanations will only increase the already near insuperable handicap in gaining any acceptance for these proposals set out hereafter. Early versions and drafts of these proposals, published in a few esoteric journals met for the most part with deafening lack of response, but there has been some encouragement by a few well qualified experts in the field. This can be summarised as follows:

'Much of what you say is flawed by some basic misunderstandings and mistakes in your exposition of certain laws of physics as you describe them but then since modern science knows so little of the problems you are considering, then any ideas ventured towards this end are worthwhile. Certainly modern science is aware that some of its current beliefs will no doubt need to be considerably revised and upgraded to reveal the answers behind the mechanisms of the mind. The fact that you are thinking about the subject at all is encouraging, and who knows, you might possibly have come up in part of your train of thought which might later prove to have some relevance to the answers sought. But until your theory is improved to acceptable levels, or you have an experimental proof, some demonstration of the resonance effect you predict, capable of being repeated in a laboratory, then you have no chance of any acceptance or even gaining the interest of the professional scientist'

That is the sort of response received over the years from those specialists I regard as more enlightened than the majority of their peers. The trouble is the reasoning involved requires some understanding of a few fundamental principles of physics, but nothing the averagely intelligent member of the reading public should not be able to cope with given adequate incentive. Then there are a number of steps in the course of the explanations that have to be grasped, remembered and applied to the argument in sequence to produce a picture of the working principle. This results in a slightly different mind set for the explanation of some of the phenomena involved, such as electromagnetic waves, which might require some mental flexibility and effort initially to have to accept. It is unfortunate that this will probably harder for many of the experts than the amateur and the layman, although it is good that the latter have this advantage. It is at this stage the experts generally lose interest and fall at the first or second of the hurdles presented in saying 'but that is not good physics'.

The greatest strength of the proposals is that they can be seen to apply across the board to so many apparently disconnected other phenomena, but that stage is often never reached. Of course that is where the strength of the hypothesis in its application to so many other issues, and what is more renders some answers surprisingly simple, once the initial principle is grasped well enough to see how easily it may be applied to these other areas. But the experts are usually not inclined to persevere long enough to take in the wide application of Duplication Theory right across the board. And again, if they were, and I suppose some of them might have so toiled to the end, the conclusions are so radical and vary enough from existing patterns of scientific thought they will be dismissed most likely out of hand. This is a severe conundrum for anyone proposing a new paradigm such as is done here, which if any where nearer the true nature of things than current beliefs, would open up a whole new sector of understanding. But here over the last few years, is the internet, the world wide web to hand for all to use. What could be more timely and fortunate serendipity for people such as myself?

The Hypothesis is written mainly in the first person singular since it contains subjective beliefs which were developed ab initio without much reference to any one other source or authority and are therefore speculative. Besides I am inclined not always to use the deceptive device of the passive and impersonal sense favoured by scientists, for presenting what are so often very personal constructs of belief. Further, although it is correctly described as a hypothesis for brevity and ease of expression I originally came up with 'Duplication Theory' as a description of my proposals, and although not strictly perhaps the most fortunate title, I continue so to use it. The main thrust of the theory is that there is a tendency which opposes that of the fundamental rule of entropy that systems run down and energy dissipates. This tendency is one of negative entropy which instead forms order where there was formerly chaos and disorder. This leads to the build up of increasingly complex structures, the finest example of which we are currently aware is organic life and the human brain, but in the same way as perhaps the most fundamental law of physics states that entropy always increases, modern science seem to have ignored the serious possibility that a counter tendency also exists. This is probably because it is such a major part of our own thought process that we are incapable of putting ourselves outside it in recognition of its existence. There are a number of eminent philosophers and scientists who have expressed veiws along these lines over the centuries, but these have not gained much recognition to date, and this is no doubt why we have still have so embarrassingly little inkling about the operation of mind and memory.    

The title of the website I was originally going to call 'Is this Life' in homage to the short book by Austrian physicist and a cofounder of Quantum theory Erwin Schrödinger, which together with his similar booklet 'Mind and Matter', I read in the late 1970s. I revised this intention later as being too pretentious but he published this slim volume in 1944 and its title was 'What is Life' and straightaway I will give a quotation which encapsulates the principle which I am seeking to explain. This is the tendency or potential to organise matter into complex structures: a tendency to counter entropy, which put simply, is a scientific expression for increasing chaos.

'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. Because I know even less biology than I do of physics I have pretty much left alone left the subject of how a life process could be explained as one of the applications of the theory. Others could do it much better and anybody who knows something about the search for the secret of life will know that an order forming tendency, if one were to exist, would be fundamentally crucial in the provision of an explanation for the self replicating ability of organic development. However the mechanism of memory is still an almost overwhelming mystery and since for many years I have deemed it to be the mainspring of the operation of mind and intelligence, the centre of my search was for an explanation of this crucial ability.