**3. Scalar fields and the vectors of consciousness**

The experience of a self is not possible without the conscious experience of: *I did it, I tried to, next time it might be better because I know now how to do it*. Based on our cellular oneness that derives from various physically nested *intentional* vector spaces, an *ego* comes about through the totality of sensor and control functions from each level of the cellular entities. The process generates an experience that is felt as a resonance system, that is, *feelings* (good feelings: positive resonance, bad feelings: negative resonance). Depending on the good or bad *feeling* (or a neutral one), we influence the directions and the intensity (the 'force') with which the processual docking-on proceeds.

#### **3.1 The hard problem of consciousness: non-commutative structures**

Chalmers, who put forward the notion of the 'hard problem of consciousness', remarks

*The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel [16] has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. … Then there are bodily sensations… the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience (Chalmers, 2011, pp. 31-32)*

In 2018, he asks, "[W]hy are physical pain processes accompanied by the feeling of pain?" (p. What we call 'feeling' is a human response to a causative root that is alien to the nature of the cause. In this way, the 'hard' problem of consciousness turns into a 'meta-problem', that is, into a question that does no longer aim at the particular quality of consciousness, but at the question of why there is this epistemic gap between phenomenal and physical factors.

#### **3.2 Quantum concepts and experience**

*Today there is accumulating evidence in the study of consciousness that quantum concepts like complementarity, entanglement, dispersive states, and non-Boolean logic play significant roles in mental processes … The term "quantum cognition" has been coined to refer to this new area of research. Perhaps a more appropriate characterization would be non-commutative structures in cognition ([18], p. 29).* *Configuring a Concept - On Iteration and Infinity DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100453*

What is in focus is, on the one hand, the brain. The brain is the physical place where nested neural structures are active. However, when dealing with consciousness, it is not the brain that is its creator. For consciousness (and a mind) to come to the fore, a totality of the responsivity to an Umwelt is needed. We regard the 'mind' as the creator of—thought, perception, emotion, memory, also imagination, and reason. The neural structures of the brain are needed as the physical *underlay* that supports what the mind is doing (like a bike is needed for riding a bike). Let us look at quantum *concepts* as a further example of the structure of a concept.

The above-mentioned quantum *concepts* have a double-sided bearing. On the one hand, they elaborate the properties of the process that gets the research of the quantum matter going by particular conceptually different aspects. On the other hand, the word *quantum concept* is the instrument used by the speaker who points to the topic that is at play.

Human thinking is afforded the means to reflect on the particular organization of sensing, the ability to reflect on both *what is sensed* just now, and by the faculty of reflecting on the wholeness of the human experience—in short, on the wealth of conceptual experience. What is called thought is the 'space' within which the senses send effects on a body into a 'sunlight' stream of reflective elements. Like the sunlight is not a phenomenon as *we* see it, and the *taste* of sugar is not what the sugar consists of, other phenomena are not what our perceptions say about them either. These relational inadequacies between what we *know* about such phenomena and how we *feel* them are approached by human minds along with the feel of it, and by researching the underlying chemical properties.

*…, the phenomenal is identical to certain neural processes, even if our perceptions from different perspectives indicate otherwise ([14], p. 423). …The sweet taste of sugar is not identical to the chemical properties of sugar, even if some of the molecular properties of sugar are what stimulate the tongue receptors for 'sweetness' (p. 442).*

What these chemical properties are and how they operate on the tongue receptors can be approximated through data that are retrieved from data sources which are helpful, but knowing about them does not change the way we feel them.

#### **3.3 Apeiron and other forms of infinity**

One form of dealing with the phenomenon of unending was, in the Western World, the belief in Gods, or in *one* (Christian) God. Eastern religions held different views, and the Greek tradition showed that the belief in Gods was not necessarily grounded in the assumption of an unending process. Sieroka (p) refers to Aristotle's remarks on Anaximander's views of the apeiron (ἄπειρον), the unlimited.

*Obviously, so the argument goes, we are surrounded by countless instances of the natural processes of becoming and declining, animals are born, grow, and die, etc. Hence, there must be a source or 'reservoir' for all these processes and, for the sake of avoiding a vicious regress, this source must be infinite, or rather inexhaustible (pp. 3-4).*

Sieroka continues to say that the ἄπειρον was not only viewed in terms of an inexhaustible source of the power for the generation of things in the world, but also as indeed spatially inexhaustible. The ἄπειρον was thus claimed to be an unlimited causal principle, not being identical with

*"any of the four elements" fire, water, earth, and air), "but rather with something 'between' them in the sense of being a source from which the elements originate. …* ἄπειρον *is discussed as denoting that which is qualitatively indeterminate. … [T]his interpretation might be interpreted as based on the assumption that there is a combat of the four elements fire, earth, water, and air, no element is allowed to prevail over the others (for then, contrary to what one observes, those other elements would cease to exist in the world). Hence, the four elements themselves must originate from something that, following the Aristotelian framework, does not share the qualities of being hot or cold, wet or dry—that is, they must originate from something that is qualitatively indeterminate" (p. 4).*

As an unlimited causal principle, the assumption is in line with what we know today about cellular processes. Cells, and higher organic units, are the building blocks of organs whose interplay results in the wholeness of an experiencing body, and the brain configures elements of experience "into resonant patters that form the basis of integral acts of life" ([16], p. 169). As shown also by the grammars of the world's languages, human environments allow for the experience of a no end. Other than that, how can it be that all languages possess the means to express the unending of processes, either by developing explicit words for it ('no end') or by aspectual systems that are generated through their grammars. *Infinity* is experienced as an unending going-on in the realm of space (infinity in the sky), of human activity (unending movements, unending new possibilities), of emotive force (kindness, benevolence), and the like.

#### **4. Georg Cantor**

Cantor created set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics. He established the importance of one-to-one correspondence between the members of two sets, defined infinite and well-ordered sets, and proved that the real numbers are more numerous than the natural numbers. In fact, Cantor's method of proof of this theorem implies the existence of an infinity of infinities (infinities of transfinites, i.e., events that have a singular end but go on indefinitely as a process of reproductive sequences and structures).

Cantorian set theory is based on the principles of extension and abstraction. The set *B* is included in, or is a subset of, a set *A* (symbolized by *B* ⊆ *A*) if every element of *B* is an element of *A*. So defined, a subset may possibly include all of the elements of *A*, so that *A* can be a subset of itself. Furthermore, the empty set, because by definition it has no elements that are not included in other sets, is a subset of every set.

An example of a finite set is the number of cigarettes in a packet of cigarettes. However, an infinite set has no last element. It is not possible to count the elements of an infinite set. The union of two infinite sets is a superset, and the superset is also infinite. Different levels of infinity represent/constitute the transfinite numbers. "Cantor himself showed that there are indefinitely many transfinite numbers beyond C [the number of points on the continuum of a line], for he proved that the set of subsets of a set always is of higher power than the set itself ([19], pp. 634–5)."

Besides making the infinite to a reality, Cantor [20] postulated that the *Endlichkeit des menschlichen Verstandes* (finiteness of the human mind), as well as of other entities which are experienced by humans as finite, continue to exist in a sequence of iterations by continuously generating the requisite process along an unlimited' stepladder' with different modes ("unbegrenzte Stufenleiter von bestimmten Modis" 1883, in 1984: p.73), that is, a sort of a continuous transfer of entities to the next stages. In light of this, he introduced the 'trans-finite' numbers as evolving in an unending sequence of iterations.

*Configuring a Concept - On Iteration and Infinity DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100453*

The above is somewhat rephrased as follows: In human lives, finiteness is an end-of-life experience. Even though there is the felt and concretely observed finiteness in relation to the *felt* stopping of individual bodies, other than that, all life processes go on. (They are *never* stopping; they trans-gress any felt stopping with an *infinite* going-on, i.e., become transfinite.)
