Consciousness, Instincts, and Life (2026)

Image: Milky Way and Supernova: Firefly, Freud: Wikimedia Commons

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Consciousness, Instincts, and Life

Antti Talvitie
aptalvitie@gmail.com

Abstract

This paper discusses my enduring curiosity as a Freudian psychoanalyst and engineer on the origins of life and consciousness. In a 2016 paper I offered the hypotheses that the Life-Death force separated in the Big Bang as the fifth fundamental force about 13.8 billion years ago, slightly after gravity.  It therefore qualifies as a force.  As a corollary, I proposed that the mysterious ‘dark energy’ may be evolutionary and connected with ‘dark matter’ in the Milky Way region of the universe.

Nine billion years later, about four and half billion years ago, Earth formed – in the same epoch as the Sun – and became hospitable to life forms and began biological evolution. The hypothesis in the paper is that the fifth force – the Life-Death Force – became decohered from the primordial coherent state of the unified force at the Big Bang and subsequently re-cohered, in some presently unknown process, when life emerged. (‘Decoherence’ and ‘re-coherence’ may extend these concepts beyond their established use). Life became the necessary and later the sufficient condition for consciousness.

 Inspired by the quantum world, I hypothesize that transmission of energetic excitations, both conscious and unconscious, may occur instantaneously, analogous to entanglement, from psychic energy, the instincts, distributed in superposition over the whole nervous system. Mental states, thinking, random and chosen exigencies of life, and explanations about them, update and store the transmitted information. Nachträglichkeit from the timeless unconscious may revise and reorganize these experiences, memories and past events in the unconscious with (un)temporality and strange causality, simultaneously even accepting contradictions. At the end of the paper quantum processes as the operating system of classical events are related to everyday behavior.

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