48 Topological Quantum Dimensional Light - PhD Physics…

By Shaun Higgins, PhD.

(Physics Vs Metaphysics)

Coherence Before Meaning: On Light, Mind, and the Geometry That Refuses to Break

What Do You Believe You Are Actually Perceiving?

When you say you see the world, what you are really saying is that your nervous system has stabilised a pattern long enough for it to become experience.

That is not a philosophical claim, but a physically relevant truth, a survival necessity…

Neural tissue does not operate as a static circuit. It is an oscillatory system, layered across frequency bands, constantly negotiating phase relationships between signals that would otherwise dissolve into noise. What you call a moment is not a slice of time. It is a temporary agreement between competing rhythms, a narrow corridor where synchronisation has just enough strength to hold.

Remove that synchrony, and the corridor collapses.

Time distorts, sequence unravels and purpose fractures…

So before anything else, there is this: the brain is not simply receiving reality, but is rather maintaining coherence against a background that does not naturally offer it.

Why Does Light Twist, and Why Does It Matter?

Light does not only travel, but can also “turn in on itself”…

In the study of Orbital Angular Momentum, photons are shown to carry structured wavefronts, spirals that encode discrete states indexed by integer values, 48 in total.

Each twist is a distinguishable configuration, a way of storing information in the geometry of the field itself.

What becomes immediately striking is not just the number of possible states, but their resilience.

When information is encoded topologically, within the structure of the field rather than its amplitude alone, it gains a kind of stubbornness. Disturb the system slightly, and the pattern remains. Noise can deform it, but not easily erase it.

Within Topological Photonics, this has become a practical pursuit… at last mainstream, which involves how to store and transmit information in forms that do not collapse under interference.

So we arrive at a key principle aspect of our physical reality… the information that survives is not the most detailed, but the most structurally stable.

What Does the Brain Preserve?

Now place that beside the nervous system.

The brain is not interested in preserving every signal, it would quite literally “cause a meltdown of epic proportions”.

The environment is too dense, too continuous, too saturated with competing inputs. What it does instead is filter, compress, and stabilise.

Oscillatory phase-locking becomes the mechanism by which certain patterns are held while others are discarded. Slower rhythms provide a scaffold. Faster activity rides within them, carrying transient detail. When these layers couple effectively, the system achieves coherence. When they do not, fragmentation begins.

What you remember is not what happened.

It is what remained coherent enough to be reconstructed.

What you anticipate is not a projection into nothing.

It is the extension of patterns already stabilised within the system.

And what you call self is not a fixed object, but rather the continuity of a pattern that has managed, against all entropy, to hold together…

Can Stability Exist Without Structure?

In condensed matter physics, there are entities known as Skyrmions. They are not particles in the classical sense, but stable configurations of a field, vortices that persist because their topology resists deformation.

They are not held together by force alone, they are held together by the impossibility of unwinding them without breaking the system that contains them.

This matters, because it introduces a different way of thinking about persistence.

Something can remain not because it is rigid, but because it is organised in a way that resists collapse.

Now consider the human mind in that light.

Not as a container of thoughts, but as a dynamic system in which certain patterns achieve a form of topological persistence. Not perfectly, not permanently, but with enough stability to appear continuous.

Identity, then, begins to look less like a structure and more like a pattern that refuses to unravel.

Where Does the Boundary Actually Sit?

It is tempting to draw a hard line at the skull, to suggest that whatever coherence exists, exists inside.

But the conditions that allow coherence are not confined so neatly. The brain operates within electromagnetic environments, within thermal gradients, within a constant exchange of energy and information with what surrounds it. Its stability depends on boundary conditions it does not control.

So the question becomes less about where the mind is located, and more about how far the conditions that sustain it extend.

Not in some abstract, limitless sense.

But in the very real, measurable way that any coherent system depends on the field in which it is embedded.

A Different Kind of Responsibility

If coherence is what allows experience to exist at all, then the quality of that coherence is no small matter.

Noise is not just an inconvenience… nope, it is disintegration in slow motion.

Fragmented attention, unresolved contradiction, internal conflict… these are not merely psychological states. They are disruptions of the very mechanism that holds reality together as something intelligible.

And alignment is not a moral slogan, but a physical condition.

When the system is coherent, patterns stabilise. Perception sharpens. Action becomes less reactive, more precise. Not because something external has been granted, but because interference has been reduced.

What, Then, Are We Actually Doing Here?

Not building meaning from nothing…

Not chasing a future that does not yet exist…

But stabilising, moment by moment, a pattern within a field that does not guarantee stability.

Holding coherence long enough for reality to become visible.

And perhaps longer still, long enough for something deeper to recognise itself within that stability…

If there is something worth saying plainly, it is this.

The world you experience is not simply given to you. It is held together by you, or more precisely, by the degree of coherence your system can sustain.

Light twists into structured states that resist noise.

Fields organise into patterns that cannot easily be undone.

And within you, across layers of oscillation and instability, something is doing the same.

Not perfectly…

Not permanently…

But persistently…

Essentially, each one of us is a “stubborn pattern”, a structured biological interpretational machine generating sentient experience…

And if you become still enough, aligned enough, coherent enough to feel it without distortion, there is a moment where that pattern stops appearing as something you possess…and begins to reveal itself as something you are.