The Myth Model of All
Life and death are woven fine, a fabric of the cloth divine— a seminal arrow shot by William Blake that pierced yours truly nearly seventy years ago.
The nominal past of events in which we have taken part with friends, family and enemies, especially in the sweet or bitter "day" of our first contemporaries, is alive and well and still with us, and we with it.
The MMA is project which constructs a model of actual time in which the linear time, which is presumed as common sense to science and society, finds a place of secondary importance.
The theologies of many religious traditions hold both God's eternity and common sense linear time to be true, with the caveat that eternity is more important.
The upshot for yours truly, the author of the MMA, has been the eventual conversion of a comfortable cradle agnostic into "the one holy and apostolic church of the Roman branch. However, he feels himself to be closer to being a holy fool of its Orthodox branch which cleaves more closely to the original Nicene Creed. Both branches believe that the eternal God was made man in one historical person, Jesus of Nazareth who is both truly human and truly God.
The scientific project which sent me to a place I didn’t want to go, and you may not either, is presented immediately below.
CHAPTER 1
1 ~ The Keystone Challenge Strikes
In the mid 1960's yours truly was a graduate student at the University of Oregon. There, he had passed all of his qualifying exams, and was prepared to study under a professor who had agreed to be his thesis advisor. Under this professor he would develop a thesis problem that would set his career course in experimental population biology.
Unexpectedly, the head of the invertebrate neurophysiology group asked him to join his group. It was a very attractive offer, but it would be a big change in career direction. Yours truly had to think over.
As he mulled over the career offer, out of the blue came a very concrete and profound insight. For decades, this insight has turned itself over and over wrapping up other similar insights up into itself and occupying his prime, or background mental space ever since. Today, transformed over the decades, this insight has become the keystone of the MMA, the Myth Model of All.
The insight concerned the physics of the biological organism's hypercomplex neural physiology. This electrodynamic system is generated by an organism's metabolism. It contains, surrounds, and penetrates an organism internally, to the very atoms and ions implicit in its mass-energy measure. It also radiates an measurable external electromagnetic field.
The electrodynamic unity as the explanation of the organism's complete behavior is in the back of the mind of all serious neuroscientists. That’s because it means, implicitly, that a unified neurophysiological theory would account for all of the behavior and felt experience of all organisms, including humans. Today, given modern computational power, this exciting intellectual project seems, to many scientists, within reach.
It seemed more clearly within reach in the mid 1960s when new means to measure the electrodynamics of single cells, especially that of nerve cells and muscle fibers, were rapidly evolving. And, the door to a cutting edge neuroscience laboratory had been opened to yours truly.
The physical neurological theory that must eventually emerge, through the work of many scientists, could always be framed in terms of existing physical theory, but the details of its yet-to-be-achieved form could not. It could be framed, because whatever final form emerged, it would conform to the fundamental principles of modern physics. Yours truly comprehended the principles of physics well enough to see what any neurophysiologist sees in this regard.
The solid insight he suffered in that moment was that the electrodynamic unity, however it eventually played out, could not be the cause of our biologically felt experience. And, likewise, our biologically felt experience could not be the cause of the electrodynamic unity. That was a Fact, one of those things, around which there was no getting for him.
As a Darwinian biologist with hands-on experience of several kinds of organisms in their habitat, the insight made it clear that felt experience, in some mode, was natural to all organisms, and that the organism's felt experience and the physics underlying neuroscience were two essentially different orders of being, up and down the biological tree of life.
At the time, the concept of fundamentally different orders of being was a strange and difficult idea for yours truly, but even though physics and felt experience are both tightly implicative and correlated, the profound question to resolve was how do these two different orders of being relate in a higher meta scientific mode?
By what unknown, but certainly systematic manner, could one relate two different orders of being? How could that be?
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Next week: Chapter 1 Section 2 ~ Light Dawns on the Field of Challenge
John the Myth Modeler
© JBSPalmer 2025