Richard Taite

When a psychologist who studies, let's say, emotion or memory or something is talking about mental processes, they're talking about something happening inside of the skull.

Um, and certainly a neuroscientist when they're studying mental life, as it relates to the brain, they're studying something happening inside of the body, you know, inside of the skull encased brain, uh, with a major focus.

So the question is what links those different perspectives.

So if you take the point of view, which is what I did back then, that they're all correct.

What would be the common ground?

Let's just assume these devoted, smart, caring people who couldn't communicate with each other, really upset with each other.

What if they were actually talking about the same thing, but they didn't know it?

And so I went for this long, long walk on the beach and I looked out at the water and the waves were coming in to the shore.

And I thought, well, this is really interesting because waves are a form of energy.

And if I look at the swelling ocean 100 yards out, and I believe that that wave is now 50 yards out, 20 yards out, 10 yards out, five, and now crashing on my feet, and I believed that the water I saw rising and falling out there is now crashing at my feet, it would be totally understandable that I would believe that.

And I'd be completely wrong.

So then I thought, well, what if these scientists are like very understandably seeing this concrete nature of stuff, but they're missing the deeper reality, which is that it's energy that is really what I'm seeing a hundred yards out.

And that's the same energy crashing that's being translated through the movement of molecules, but it's not the same molecule.

It's not the same water.

If you put dye way out there, the dye would not be coming a hundred yards to get to me.

It would just be the energy.

So I said, okay, well then what is this energy business?

So that just started a whole journey to say, and I started reading strangely that week, math books on what are called complex systems.

It's a long story, but the bottom line is in 1980s, mathematicians had determined that something called a complex system, which has certain characteristics,

But water would be an example of it.