Making Room for Mental Space

According to the consensus cosmological theory of the inflationary big bang, the universe originated about 14 billion years ago with no initial conditions, inherent nature, order, or purpose—from literally nothing. Instantaneously it was randomly fluctuating quantized gravity and Higgs fields that through spontaneous symmetry breaking formed into four fundamental particle-forces. The forces congealed into atomic structures, elements, stars, planets, organic molecules, living cellular organisms, and eventually humans with complex enough nervous systems to generate higher-order conscious mind with apparent causal control of its lower-order parts. How the closed physical causal chain unlinked and inserted a causally efficacious conscious mind at some stage of neural complexity is inexplicable; there is no room for it in the physicalist view—it must be epiphenomenal and a fundamental misperception. A coherent alternative is developing in quantum and quantum gravity theories of a proposed information space or nonlocal mental space underneath the physical. The progression of theories is overviewed with respect to the nature of space, and are shown to be increasingly consistent withs the ancient Vedic tradition of knowledge that makes room for a causally efficacious conscious mind.