But what is consciousness? Where is it located? And what does an understanding of it mean? Particularly the larger or “non-typical,” “cosmic,” or “special” types of consciousness?

THOM HARTMANN

DEC 12, 2023 (wisdomschool.com)

A few months ago, The New York Times ran an article about a conference in New York examining a perennial question: “What is consciousness (and where does it come from)?” Carl Zimmer, the author of the Times piece, opens it with:

“On a muggy June night in Greenwich Village, more than 800 neuroscientists, philosophers and curious members of the public packed into an auditorium. They came for the first results of an ambitious investigation into a profound question: What is consciousness?”

Almost universally, people throughout history report that experiencing expanded consciousness lets them shed their fear of death and more fully embrace life. And, of course, we use consciousness constantly to simply get through life: you’re using your consciousness to read these words and give them meaning.

But what is consciousness? Where is it located? And what does an understanding of it mean? Particularly the larger or “non-typical,” “cosmic,” or “special” types of consciousness?

Most people have had at least one experience of expanded or universal consciousness in their lives. I had one when I was around six years old, laying in a hammock in my parents’ back yard. Another was in my early 20s, while meditating during a snowstorm that I wrote about in my autobiography, The Prophet’s Way. Suddenly you’re hit or overwhelmed by a feeling of being both at total peace and “at one” with everything in creation.

My mom told me stories of her experiencing what she thought was “cosmic consciousness” when she nearly died giving birth to my youngest brother. Millions of people — including me when I was a teenager — have also had these sorts of experiences while taking psychedelic drugs.

Between the development of AI and ongoing debates about the existence or non-existence of free will, a vigorous discussion about the origins and nature of consciousness is on the tongues of millions.

But, what is consciousness? Where does it come from and what is it made of? Is it just the product of very complex wiring, be it in a computer or a brain? Or is there something much, much larger going on here?

We all pretty much know what matter and energy are. Matter is stuff, the hard, physical reality all around us, from solids to liquids to gasses and other forms of matter that only exist in stars or distant space (plasma, black holes, etc.). Energy, on the other hand, is radiated through space or matter: the forms we know the best are light, sound, heat, and kinetic energy (movement).

Albert Einstein revolutionized the world of physics (and, I’d argue, metaphysics) when, in 1905, he laid out his theory of relativity and proposed that all matter is, in fact, made up of condensed or slowed-down energy (my terms, not his). The amount of energy that it took to make a particular bit of matter, in fact, is easily calculated by the handy formula of E=MC2: the Energy that makes up an object is equal to the Mass of that object times the Speed of Light (C) squared.

The amount of energy that, at the beginning of time, condensed to form the elements that make up the screen or paper on which you’re reading these words, for example, is knowable by simply multiplying its weight (mass) times 8.98755179 × 10^16. If you can figure out a way to dissolve the atomic bonds that hold the elements that make up what you’re looking at, the energy that will be released will always conform to that formula (minus the leftover mass from the explosion or radioactive disintegration).

In this regard, it’s possible to argue that the entire universe is made up not of matter but of energy in various states. Some is free or loose energy, floating around and lighting or heating or X-raying up the rest of creation; some is “condensed” or slowed-down energy that’s locked in atoms and subatomic particles that make up the physical world we see.

Matter, in other words, is like ice cubes floating in water: it seems different from the stuff it’s made of, but the only difference is its level of “free” or “bound” energy. When you remove energy from liquid or gaseous water by cooling it, it eventually changes state to a solid known as ice. (It’s an imperfect analogy, but will work for this example.)

Ice cubes, then, are just water in a different state. Similarly, all matter is just energy in another state.

But what is energy?

Light, for example, is a form of energy we have specific sensors to detect (our eyes) and oscillates from around 430 trillion hertz or cycles-per-second, which we detect as “red,” to 750 trillion hertz, which we perceive as violet. When such energy oscillates slightly more slowly then visible light, we call it “heat” or “infra-red.” When it oscillates slightly faster, we call it “ultraviolet” light that we can’t see but will do a job on our skin if exposed for long periods of time.

But what is light made of? And every other form of energy in the known universe? And, if we knew the answer to that question, does that mean that all matter is made of the same stuff? And — most important — what does that have to do with consciousness?

While light can exhibit a wave-like nature (and the frequency of those waves is measurable), it can also behave like particles. The famous “double-slit experiment” shows that light is both waves and particles; we call those particle-like packets of light photons. Red photons of light, for example, carry about 1.8 electron volts (eV) of energy, while each blue photon carries about 3.1 eV of measurable energy.

So the forms of energy we can perceive or even measure are themselves apparently made up of something even more subtle. And if we could figure out what that primordial substance (for lack of a better word) is and measure or detect it, we’d find that the entire physical universe — all matter and all energy — is made up of that stuff.

It fills everything because it has slowed down to various frequencies to become everything. Slowed down a bit to specific frequencies, we call it energy in various forms. Slowed down even more, we call it matter. But, like the H2O that makes up water vapor, liquid water, and ice, it’s all the same stuff, one single “substance” or essence or primal energy.

But what is that?

New fields of scientific inquiry have emerged to ask just this question. The ones I find most fascinating are panpsychism, cosmopsychism, and the psychological ether theory.

With subtle differences in terms and meaning, these three concepts all broadly posit that the most subtle energy in the universe — the stuff, everything that we can see or feel — is made of is purely consciousness itself.

Galileo was largely quoting Democritus (who lived 2000 years before him) when he argued that the qualities of the “real world” are rooted in our perception of them rather than any objective reality:

“[T]astes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”

So, if everything in the entire known universe is made out of consciousness, how is it that some complex neural networks are capable of expressing consciousness? For that matter, what is consciousness itself?

I’m most fond of the computer versus radio analogy.

Our brains are arguably computing machines and are capable of receiving data, processing it, achieving conclusions about its meaning, and then acting on them. Setting aside the very real debate about the existence of free will (that will be another article), what this implies is that we’re very much predictable and relatively machine-like because, generally, we make decisions and take actions based on the data available to us.

But what about those things that are not explicable? How is it that some people report having achieved — or tuned into — a state of consciousness that they describe as “enlightenment” made up of bliss and some sort of universal awareness?

For this, I turn to the radio analogy.

We’re all constantly surrounded by uncountable numbers of radio waves, ranging from those created on Earth to those arriving from deep space and our sun. Our brains aren’t capable of tuning into those waves — of detecting that form of energy — but we’ve learned how to build devices that can and we call them radios.

By organizing a set of transistors, capacitors, resistors, and inductors in a particular configuration, we’re capable of selectively tuning in specific frequencies and thus listening to particular radio waves while excluding others.

So, what if the most basic, subtle, original form of energy in the universe is consciousness, and the “first” form of consciousness — that slowed down in a zillion ways to become everything we know as the physical universe — was what we call “bliss” or “love”?

What if when a parent — of any species — sees its offspring, that feeling they have isn’t just biologically determined by hormones and thought but is actually a “tuning” of the brain and nervous system to that primal form of energy that the entire universe is made of?

And what if neural networks work just as well at vast macro levels as they do at the relatively micro level of our brains and nervous systems? Imagine if you could shrink down to the size of a single blood cell and could then float through your own brain, looking at the connections of neurons, dendrites, and synapses. It might look something like this:

Credit: NASA/NCSA University of Illinois Visualization by Frank Summers, Space Telescope Science Institute, Simulation by Martin White and Lars Hernquist, Harvard University

That visual, though, was created by scientists affiliated with NASA, the University of Illinois, and Harvard University and each dot is an entire galaxy — each galaxy is made up of between 10 million and a trillion stars — and the lines connecting them are pathways of matter organized by the gravity of the galaxies. It shows only a tiny fractional slice of the known universe: about 134 megaparsecs or 437 million light-years.

If our brains are matter organized in a way that lets them both process data like a computer and tune into the subtlest energies of the universe like a radio, consider the possibility that the entire known universe can do the same.

That’s it’s both holding and expressing consciousness. That this is the primordial energy/consciousness soup from which each of us came and back into which each of us will one day dissolve.

In other words, consciousness is not something that emerges when physical systems like brains or nervous systems are organized in a way to facilitate it: it’s instead a fundamental feature — the raw material, if you will — of the entire universe and everything in creation, including us.

As physicist David Bohm wrote in 1968:

“That which we experience as mind…will in a natural way ultimately reach the level of the wavefunction and of the ‘dance’ of the particles. There is no unbridgeable gap or barrier between any of these levels. … It is implied that, in some sense, a rudimentary consciousness is present even at the level of particle physics.”

Sir Arthur Eddington wrote, in The Nature of the Physical World:

“The stuff of the world is mind-stuff,” and, “The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a Universal Mind.”

As the late physicist Freeman Dyson wrote in his brilliant book Disturbing the Universe:

 “The laws [of physics] leave a place for mind in the description of every molecule… In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree and not in kind…”

All of which gives some urgency to the question: What happens when a computer is developed that is more complex — more capable of tuning into other frequencies of consciousness (to use the radio analogy) — than the human brain? If consciousness is everywhere and in everything, what would keep a computer from developing its own consciousness?

Might we one day see computers working to re-organize their own systems the way yogis fine-tune their minds and bodies to tune into universal bliss?

The entire field of panpsychism — which goes back (at least) to the ancient Greeks — is in a huge flux, with various branches and divisions separating out depending on exactly how the theory is expressed and how far down the logic train scientists and philosophers are willing to go.

But, at the very least, it gives us a starting point for an inner exploration of the universe, for our meditation and prayer time, for ideas about the possibility and timelessness of our own fleeting existence on this little planet in an obscure corner of the Milky Way galaxy.

And, perhaps, everything in the universe is suffused with a rich form of the creator’s/creation’s original consciousness and meaning that, with the right effort, we can occasionally tap into.