Abstract Incorporating a conscious 1st person observer in scientific theories has been hampered by the lack of physically viable mind/body models. I will present a Cognitive Action Theory (CAT) model of an integrated mind/body system and identify the process of creating conscious experience as the basic building block of reality. This building block is a cyclic process in time, connecting the 1st-person experience with its 3rd-person physical models so that conscious phenomena are possible. We therefore propose a fundamental shift to consider what we do to be conscious as an a-priory activity that must be happening for us to be able to ask the question, “How can conscious beings exist in our physical world?” This activity contains both qualia and an explanation to produce what Archibald Wheeler described as a self measuring explanatory cycle. At this level of definition such a cycle of activity can accommodate any belief system defining physical reality as an explanation for personal experience and therefore provides a framework which accommodates most scientific and spiritual traditions. However visualizing abstract activity as the motion of masses and charges that together compose matter allows us to couple what we do to the formalism of classic physics thus describing a Reality of interacting events. Such a theory integrates the subjective and objective aspect of our experience in a single physical framework, reducing to the linear quantum formalism when the motions involved are small enough to be reversible.
Abstract Incorporating a conscious 1st person observer in scientific theories has been hampered by the lack of physically viable mind/body models. I will present a Cognitive Action Theory (CAT) model of an integrated mind/body system and identify the process of creating conscious experience as the basic building block of reality. This building block is a cyclic process in time, connecting the 1st-person experience with its 3rd-person physical models so that conscious phenomena are possible. We therefore propose a fundamental shift to consider what we do to be conscious as an a-priory activity that must be happening for us to be able to ask the question, “How can conscious beings exist in our physical world?” This activity contains both qualia and an explanation to produce what Archibald Wheeler described as a self measuring explanatory cycle. At this level of definition such a cycle of activity can accommodate any belief system defining physical reality as an explanation for personal experience and therefore provides a framework which accommodates most scientific and spiritual traditions. However visualizing abstract activity as the motion of masses and charges that together compose matter allows us to couple what we do to the formalism of classic physics thus describing a Reality of interacting events. Such a theory integrates the subjective and objective aspect of our experience in a single physical framework, reducing to the linear quantum formalism when the motions involved are small enough to be reversible.
Incorporating a conscious 1st person observer in scientific theories has been hampered by the lack of physically viable mind/body models. I will present a Cognitive Action Theory (Baer 2020) model of an integrated mind/body system and identify the process of creating conscious experience as the basic building block of reality. This building block is a cyclic process in time, connecting the first person experience with its 3d person physical models so that conscious phenomena are possible. To allow the construction of such a basic building block we propose a fundamental shift to consider what we do to be conscious as an a-priory activity that must be happening for us to be able to ask the question, “How can conscious beings exist in our physical world?” This shift means first asking, “How does the memory of a physical world exist in a conscious being”? The answer to this question leads to Conscious Action Theory (CAT) and the physical formulation of a conscious being as a self contained action cycle with the mental and physical phases. This activity contains both qualia and its explanation to produce what physicist Archibald Wheeler [1,2] described as a self measuring explanatory cycle. At this level of abstraction such a cycle of activity can accommodate any belief system defining physical reality as an explanation for personal experience and therefore provide a framework which accommodates both scientific and spiritual traditions. Visualizing such an abstract activity as the motion of masses and charges allows us to couple what we do to the formalism of classic and quantum physics. Such a theory integrates the subjective and objective aspect of our experience in a single physical framework, reducing to the linear quantum formalism when the motions involved are small enough to be reversible [3,4].
Conscious Action Theory provides a logical unification between the spirit and the material, by identifying reality as an event that processes personal experiences into explanatory memories, from which personal experiences are regenerated in a never-ending cycle of activity. Baer explores the idea that our personal feelings are undeniable facts that have been systematically excluded from the basic sciences, thereby leaving us with a schizophrenic division between objective materialism and spiritual idealism. Cognitive Action Theory (CAT) achieves this unification by recognizing that the observer’s existence is the foundational premise underlying all scientific inquiry. It develops as an event-oriented physical theory in which the first-person observer is central. By analyzing the methods through which we human observers gain knowledge and create the belief systems within which our experiences are explained, we discover a fundamental truth: all systems are observers and exhibit some form of internal awareness. Events, not the objects appearing in them, are the fundamental building blocks of reality. The book is comprised of three parts: the first addresses the paradigm shift from an object to an event-oriented world view, the second develops the foundations of action physics for an event-oriented world view and the third provides examples of how these new ideas can be applied to move our knowledge up the next evolutionary step of human development. This book will benefit anyone questioning their role in the universe, especially those in interdisciplinary fields of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and medicine, who seek understanding of quantum theory as the physics of conscious systems that know the world.
Conscious Action Theory provides a logical unification between the spirit and the material, by identifying reality as an event that processes personal experiences into explanatory memories, from which personal experiences are regenerated in a never-ending cycle of activity. Baer explores the idea that our personal feelings are undeniable facts that have been systematically excluded from the basic sciences, thereby leaving us with a schizophrenic division between objective materialism and spiritual idealism.
Cognitive Action Theory (CAT) achieves this unification by recognizing that the observer’s existence is the foundational premise underlying all scientific inquiry. It develops as an event-oriented physical theory in which the first-person observer is central. By analyzing the methods through which we human observers gain knowledge and create the belief systems within which our experiences are explained, we discover a fundamental truth: all systems are observers and exhibit some form of internal awareness. Events, not the objects appearing in them, are the fundamental building blocks of reality. The book is comprised of three parts: the first addresses the paradigm shift from an object to an event-oriented world view, the second develops the foundations of action physics for an event-oriented world view and the third provides examples of how these new ideas can be applied to move our knowledge up the next evolutionary step of human development.
This book will benefit anyone questioning their role in the universe, especially those in interdisciplinary fields of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and medicine, who seek understanding of quantum theory as the physics of conscious systems that know the world.
This chapter shows that the Conscious Action Theory (CAT) model of interacting conscious beings is a superset of quantum theory. Quantum theory itself will be derived as a linear approximation applicable when disturbances in the material-producing experiences are small enough to be reversible oscillations around a dynamic equilibrium state. Historically quantum theory grew out of classical physics as an attempt to explain how light interacts with matter to produce the colors that were observed spectroscopically. The chapter shows how the essential components of quantum theory already model an action cycle. It aims to assume the interior matter beyond or internal to a Hilbert space-cell boundary is composed of mass and charge densities. The mass and charge densities move relative to each other in order to maintain their equilibrium positions. However, once we must deal with the growth and destruction of the memory cells, which surely happens, it will be necessary to adopt CAT and the event-oriented world view.
The study of consciousness and subjective experience represents one of the most intricate frontiers in contemporary philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. For decades, dominant paradigms have characterized the mind through two reductive lenses: as a passive receptor of sensory data or as a computational system processing information through fixed algorithmic operations. While useful in specific contexts, these models consistently fail to capture the dynamic, participatory nature of conscious experience—the recursive relationship between awareness and reality construction. Recent theoretical developments challenge these frameworks by integrating diverse conceptual domains: quantum mechanics metaphors, classical mindfulness traditions, and cognitive behavioral theory. These emerging approaches propose a fundamentally transformative role for the observer, suggesting consciousness does not merely witness reality but actively participates in shaping it.
Is mind quantum-like? Is consciousness quantum physical? Does consciousness have a role to play in the emergence of the classical world from the underlying quantum universe? Or is this dichotomy between classical and quantum an illusion? How can world philosophies enrich our views on these matters and interact with the best scientific theories? These are some questions that motivated us to conceive the current book. We also felt an urgent need to discuss the central philosophical questions haunting the emerging frameworks of quantum cognition and quantum-like framework (QLF). We have observed that there are very good technical or mathematical works being done in the emerging fields of quantum cognition and QLF, but there is still a great need for exploring the underlying and open philosophical questions they demand. Quantum cognition developed as a frontier research programme in understanding various cognitive phenomena that are hard or impossible to describe based on classical cognitive science paradigm. Classical cognitive science draws philosophically and mathematically from classical physics and classical probability theory. For example, cognitive realism thinking is deeply motivated by the scientific realism of classical physics. However, as we explore, there are numerous empirical findings which demonstrate clearly that human mind and cognitive processes exhibit features that are more quantum-like. Central to these features are indeterminacy, context dependence, and complementarity of cognitive phenomena, for example, perception, information retrieval, and even qualia. Many good works in the previous decade have demonstrated the efficacy of quantum-like mathematical modelling in such cases. However, given that efficacy, we cannot simply conclude that mind is quantum. Rather there are features that go beyond what is allowed in standard quantum formalism.