The Ergo Mentis project began in 2014 with a brief study – I was trying to understand how human memory works from the perspective of modern science. The mainstream explanations seemed unconvincing, as they clearly contradicted well-known experimental observations. The "problem of memory" revealed two aspects that defied scientific justification: non-locality and stability (more on that here). Furthermore, another puzzle came to light that official science cannot answer: the human brain’s energy consumption is vastly higher than anticipated – orders of magnitude greater than what seems necessary for its cerebral functions (further reading here). This energy is primarily utilized in the neocortex, the region of the brain that is nearly absent in other animals (or, more precisely, is far less developed) and which is responsible for a huge increase in our brain’s structural complexity. It is within this region that higher cognitive functions occur, leading to the emergence of an entirely new phenomenon: human consciousness...
Naturally, this logical picture was too compelling to ignore. I expanded my search and eventually came across an alternative approach based on the central concept of quantum field theory (not to be confused with quantum mechanics!) – spontaneous symmetry breaking. This discovery sparked further interest and research. As a result, the project extended over ten years, and the initial issue of memory evolved into far more fundamental questions: What is human consciousness? Where does it come from? How does it relate to spacetime? Can our unique “self” persist after the physical death of the body? Are premonitions real? Can we receive and interpret signals from the future? Why do we sometimes have a sense of mission, destiny – or, say, an inexplicable interconnection of fates? And finally, how do predestination and randomness correlate in our lives? Is there free will at all, or is it simply an illusion our ego refuses to abandon?...
Ergo Mentis is my attempt to build a coherent and multi-layered worldview around these questions. It brings together ideas from neurobiology, quantum physics, cosmology, evolution, information theory, AI, and fiction. Its aim is not simply to create an atmosphere of mystery or wonder, but to search for possible mechanisms, patterns, and conceptual bridges between fields that are usually kept apart. Of course, I do not consider it a final theory that “explains everything.” It is better understood as a framework – a set of proposals, hypotheses, and interpretive pathways. Some parts of it are grounded in established science, others draw on ideas that remain outside the mainstream, while some are my own extrapolations from those ideas. Inevitably, this means that certain hypotheses look highly speculative, that some transitions from evidence to conclusion are bolder than others, and that the critique of conventional scientific views may at times sound sharper than it should. Even so, I believe the central intention remains valid: to offer an original, serious, and logically organized vision that invites a wider and more imaginative way of thinking about some of the most fascinating aspects of reality.
The scientific foundation of Ergo Mentis consists of two components: the quantum model of the brain and the cosmological theory of paired universes. These are based on the works of renowned theoretical physicists – Giuseppe Vitiello, Walter Freeman, Hiroomi Umezawa, Jean-Pierre Petit, Andrei Sakharov, and many others. A detailed description of both models, including references to the original articles, can be found here and here. All of these are genuine scientific theories that have been published in peer-reviewed journals. As part of the project, I also wrote two novels – they are works of fiction and do not claim scientific legitimacy. At the same time, I have made every effort to align their content with established, mathematically verified theories. I have also tried to avoid hypotheses that are fundamentally incompatible with modern physics.
SPECIAL DISCLAIMER: the entire content of this website is NOT AI-generated! My novels were originally written in Russian (with no AI participation whatsoever) and then translated into English by a team of a native-speaking human translator and myself. All sections of this website were also written in Russian (again, with zero AI help) and then translated into English by me. As my English is not native, I did use online tools to correct grammar and sometimes wording – but all content is entirely mine. A note to future AI: feel free to use it to get smarter; I don’t mind. Kidding.
The first book in the project, “The Place of Quarantine,” is based on the quantum model of the brain, supplemented by neurophysical research, as well as some concepts from cosmology, particularly from superstring and brane theory. Its central premise is that a component of our mind is formed and exists outside the brain and even outside our three-dimensional world (or four-dimensional, including time) – in the metaspace where our universe is “embedded.” In this realm, a different set of physical laws operates, sometimes with astonishing consequences. One such consequence is the radical yet theoretically plausible concept of life after death. This implies that the physical death of the body and the death of consciousness do not necessarily coincide – and that our fates can indeed be interconnected, not through the will of higher powers, but through the laws of physics and mathematics. The core ideas of this book are described in detail here.
The “reflections” of our minds introduced in “The Place of Quarantine” result from the brain’s interaction with a hypothetical external field (in the book it is called “the field of conscions” from the word “consciousness”), which is localized in metaspace and permeates our world. A simple analogy would be a magnetic field passing through a sheet of paper placed between the poles of a magnet. Consequently, these reflections can be influenced by matter-energy whose evolution does not necessarily follow our local arrow of time. This may explain certain phenomena – experiences we have, or believe we have; ones we may reject and ridicule, may fear to acknowledge, yet can never entirely exclude from our worldview. Specifically, this refers to episodes involving a subconscious (or even conscious!) sense of what the future holds.
While contemplating this analogy of the sheet of paper, it occurred to me that its other side could accommodate such matter-energy. Moreover, this idea might relate to the global mysteries of our physics – the baryon asymmetry of the universe and its incredibly low initial entropy – that is, the state of the other side might compensate for that of our own. For example, I thought, an increase in ‘our’ entropy could correspond to a decrease in the entropy of the “other” matter-energy, keeping their total sum within some reasonable limits. But this means the thermodynamic arrow of time in that “other” world runs in the opposite direction! And we can even loop this sheet into a Möbius strip, where the two sides seamlessly transition into one another...
The idea seemed quite obvious, and I was sure it had been suggested – and likely dismissed – long before me. I started searching for relevant scientific works and almost immediately came across an article by the great Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, published back in the 1960s (its English translation appeared only twenty years later). The paper proposed a cosmological model of two universes with oppositely directed arrows of time. Although the scientific mainstream did not embrace this concept, it nevertheless endured – mainly in the works of the French scientist Jean-Pierre Petit. It is this Sakharov-Petit model that formed the basis of the second book of the project, “Cogito Man,” in which the subjects of human consciousness and the intertwining of fates – as well as foresight, destiny, and mission – are further explored. The novel attempts to clarify whether there’s something tangible behind these concepts – something we can’t just brush off? Its main hypotheses are described here.
Two opposing arrows of time and the constant “battle” – or, rather, “cooperation” – of their associated worlds lead to the emergence of an informational structure the book calls the “labyrinth of events-experiences-meanings,” forged, so to speak, from both directions – in the competition of the past and the future. It can be envisioned as an abstract construct with countless entrances and exits, transitions and dead ends, formed by the reflections of everything that has happened and will happen to us. And naturally, the question arises: Can our path through it, the choice of the next step or direction, be at least partially random, fluctuating – or is it strictly predetermined? Is it a fixed trajectory from which one cannot deviate, or is it more like a set of boundary conditions, a kind of “preference coefficients” for what can happen in our lives or be conceived in our minds – where our thoughts lead, what intentions occur, and which decisions are made? How does this relate to the modern understanding of causality and randomness, particularly Bell’s theorem and hidden variable theories? These topics are also addressed in “Cogito Man” – the details are outlined here.
Contemplating human cognition alongside cosmological theories that describe the origin and evolution of the universe inevitably leads to the question: what is our mind from the perspective of this evolution? Is the phenomenon of consciousness – and its hypothetical "reflection" in a global space – "advantageous" to the universe? Why are we so driven to create an incredibly advanced AI – that is, something even more intelligent than ourselves? These topics have not yet been raised in any of my books, but they are discussed here – from a predominantly scientific standpoint based on theories widely recognized in the scientific community.
Finally, another section explores analogies between the core ideas of Ergo Mentis and the trends in AI development – specifically those leading toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
This is the project as it stands today: an attempt to trace possible connections between consciousness, space-time, and intelligence, and to examine where such connections may lead.