The book ‘The Science of Consciousness' introduces a new physical worldview. It proposes that the mind is a self-regulating physical system and an elementary particle, which interacts through elementary forces, called emotions. The complex neural organization of birds and mammals allows the formation of emotions based on the mind’s homeostatic regulation. Emotions are energy states of the brain, which become the tools of survival; with them, dangers can be avoided or overcome, and opportunities can be found. Animals with more sophisticated emotions appear later in evolution, and they exhibit great evolutionary advantages. Emotions allow them to be warm-blooded, form the mysterious world of consciousness, and form love to raise their young.
The mind's elementary forces are the emotional equivalents of gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and the strong nuclear forces, which permit for the first time the real classification of emotions. Newton's laws and the laws of thermodynamics apply to material systems over space but govern emotional interactions over time. Thus the mind is a temporal fermion. Humans and even mammals exhibit hysteresis-like behavior, interference, entanglement, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The Pauli exclusion principle leads to territorial needs. The brain always recovers its energy-neutral state, the default mode network, which turns it into a quantum system. It is found that human decision making can be best described by quantum probability.
Recognizing the mind as a self-regulating system and an elementary particle can open the book of understanding animal and human behavior, social and physiological problems, uncover possible cure of mental diseases, and lead to better animal welfare. Understanding the nature and operation of emotions is like having a new city map or a GPS in a car. It becomes possible to navigate our lives and reach our goals.
