On the human mind: from Plato to Heisenberg to dark energy

Resumo

The topic of the human mind has fascinated scientists and philosophers alike throughout the Millennia. In this article the author expresses his personal view on the nature of the human mind in the context of the body-mind issue. As he looks at this subject matter in retrospective and, more importantly, from the perspective of the future, the author wishes to avoid entering into deep philosophical discussions (for which he is not qualified), opting instead for metaphoric reasoning, grounded in modern physics. In the quest to comprehend the nature of the human mind, the author invokes the concept of dark energy, a novel force from cosmology responsible for the continuous expansion of the universe. In order to illustrate the complexity of the mind-body issue the author examines the phenomenon of time.