Danielle Zickl

Sat, May 23, 2026 (Yahoo.com)

“Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links.”

Picture this: You’re watching a sunset on the beach during the summer. As the sun sinks down into the ocean, you watch the sky transform into a canvas of warm reds, deep oranges, and pastel violets. You’re warm and happy as memories of childhood vacations come flooding back to you.

Feeling what it’s actually like to be alive in that moment, watching the sunset, is the essence of consciousness—otherwise known as the state of being awake, aware of your surroundings, and able to process experiences. One explanation for consciousness likens your brain to a computer, and consciousness is the software running on it. Neurons fire, signals zip across synapses, and voilà, you experience the world. But what if consciousness is actually a fundamental building block of the universe itself, similar to gravity or mass, rather than something the brain creates?

That’s the crux of a recent presentation from neuroscientist Christof Koch, PhD, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute, a multidisciplinary research organization based in Seattle—and the theory could finally answer some of the cosmos’ greatest mysteries.

“The question is whether—and to what extent—the entire physical world is a manifestation of something mental,” Koch says in an interview.

He explains that everything we experience in the external world—from seeing the sun set over the horizon or feeling —is mediated by our conscious experience. To Koch, this implies that only conscious experience truly exists. Everything else, like the material world, is secondary, he says.

Koch explains how previous consciousness theories—like physicalism—fail to explain things like why people have love for their children, why people find Beethoven beautiful, and why we like the sunshine.

Physicalism states every thought, emotion, and experience you have is due to underlying physical and neurobiological processes. But it doesn’t account for the subjective aspect of them. For instance, physicalism explains how your brain registers a sunset, but it doesn’t explain how you actually feel when you see the beautiful mix of colors in the sky.

For Nicco Reggente, PhD—research director of the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, a research lab based in Santa Monica, California—“consciousness” is the capacity for experience. Like Koch, Reggente also believes consciousness is a basic component of reality, rather than something produced solely by the brain.

He compares our working minds to a flying kite, where the kite is the brain and the wind is consciousness as a fundamental part of reality. “The kite has to be built from the right materials in the right configuration with the right tether, but its flight depends entirely on the wind,” Reggente says.

A radio makes another good analogy, Reggente explains.

“[The radio] doesn’t produce the broadcast, it receives and transduces a signal that’s already present,” he says. “But unlike a radio, the brain isn’t merely reproducing that signal with high fidelity—it’s interacting with it. And that interaction is what gives rise to our particular subjective experience.”

So, if consciousness is indeed a fundamental part of the universe, what does this mean for us as people? For starters, it could answer a host of questions we’ve otherwise viewed as impossible, according to Reggente.

He believes that the “hard problem of consciousness”—or how subjective experience could arise from physical matter—is the obvious case.

“If consciousness is fundamental, the question dissolves: You no more need to explain how the mind emerges from matter than a physicist needs to explain how spacetime emerges from something more basic,” Reggente says. “With this view, the ‘hard problem’ is not a problem at all.”

The same logic applies to cosmological puzzles—or other all-encompassing questions that seem impossible to answer—like, “What came before the Big Bang?” or “What is the universe expanding into?” according to Reggente.

“They feel unanswerable because they’re category errors, not because the answers are hidden,” he says. “Instead of asking how matter produces mind, we ask how mind structures itself into the appearance of matter. Many of our hardest problems may turn out to be artifacts of starting from the wrong place.”

That same logic might apply to problems on a much more human level, too. Consciousness is already a consideration in medicine—but if it’s a fundamental part of reality, might that change how medical professionals treat patients, like those in comas or who have been clinically pronounced dead but were successfully resuscitated?

Roughly 10 percent of patients who survive an in-hospital cardiac arrest report having a near-death experience (NDE), in which they temporarily died, according to Koch. Regardless of any metaphysical explanations, those who experience an NDE come back permanently transformed for the better.

Indeed, despite experiencing a massive physical trauma like a heart attack, the vast majority of NDEs are overwhelmingly positive. Patients frequently report that they “encountered the absolute,” Koch says—which, according to his theory, might be some sort of fundamental consciousness.

But Koch says doctors are generally not taught about this in medical school, and as such, will often dismiss these patient experiences. On the other hand, Reggente argues the view of consciousness as fundamental does not substantially alter clinical treatment. The kite can be broken, the radio can be damaged, but the brain remains a necessary receiver for that individual’s consciousness, Reggente says.

Should researchers ever prove Koch and Reggente correct, it would not only decode the mysteries of our minds, but also of our universe. So next time you admire a beautiful sunset lowering toward the horizon, know that your consciousness may be the ultimate stage hand pulling the strings.

(Contributed by Janet Cornwell, H.W., m.)

When one of the world’s leading neuroscientists starts sounding like a mystic, something important is shifting in how we understand what it means to be human…

Thom Hartmann

May 06, 2026 (wisdomschool.com)

Share

I read the news from a recent symposium in Porto twice, and then I sat with it for a long while looking out at the trees in front of my office. Christof Koch, one of the most respected neuroscientists alive, the man who literally helped invent the modern science of consciousness alongside Francis Crick back in the 1990s, was telling a roomful of his colleagues that he’s no longer convinced the brain creates consciousness at all.

He thinks consciousness might be a fundamental feature of reality itself, the way mass and electromagnetism and gravity are. The brain doesn’t generate awareness so much as receive, shape, and channel it. Coming from Koch, who runs the Allen Institute for Brain Science and spent his whole career trying to find the neural correlates of consciousness, that’s a tectonic shift.

For me it landed more like a homecoming than a surprise. I spent long stretches of my younger life walking a forest path in Stadtsteinach, in northern Bavaria, with my old friend and teacher Gottfried Müller. I wrote a whole book about him called The Prophet’s Way, named after that forest trail.

Things happened on those walks that I’ve never been able to explain to a materialist’s satisfaction. Herr Müller would know what I was about to say before I said it. Animals would behave around him in ways I’d never seen animals behave around any other person. There were moments when the boundary between his mind and mine, and between both of us and the woods we were walking through, felt less like a wall and more like a screen door. You could feel things passing through.

For years I tried to talk myself out of those experiences. I’d been raised in the post-war American faith that the brain is a meat computer and that anything that looks like soul or telepathy or awareness-without-a-body is either a glitch in the wiring or a story we tell ourselves so we’ll be less afraid of dying.

That’s still the official position of most of the scientific establishment. It’s called materialism, or physicalism, and for the last hundred or so years it’s been treated less like a hypothesis than like the air the room is made of.

Koch’s whole point in Porto is that the air may not actually be there. He laid out three places where the materialist story breaks down.

The first is the so-called hard problem of consciousness, named by the philosopher David Chalmers in 1995. Even if we could map every single neuron firing in your visual cortex when you see the color red, we still have no idea why there’s something it’s like to see red. Information processing alone doesn’t explain the inside view.

The second is modern physics, where the deeper anyone digs, into quantum mechanics, the measurement problem, the role of the observer, the harder it gets to defend the picture of solid stuff bumping around in empty space.

And the third is what Koch politely calls anomalous experiences: near-death experiences, mystical states, and a phenomenon called terminal lucidity, where dementia patients sometimes wake up hours before death, recognize their families, speak in full sentences, and say goodbye, with a brain that on autopsy is far too damaged to be doing any of those things.

None of that fits the meat-computer model. And there are are now far too many cases to wave away.

So what does Koch propose instead? He says it may be time to revisit some old, supposedly-discarded ideas: idealism, which holds that mind is fundamental and matter emerges from it, and panpsychism, which holds that consciousness, in some form, goes all the way down.

He champions a particular framework called Integrated Information Theory, which says that any system integrating information at a high enough level (a brain, an octopus, a forest, perhaps even a galaxy) has some form of inner experience.

You and I have a lot of it. A worm has a little. A pile of sand probably has none. The line between conscious and not conscious stops being a wall between humans and everything else, and starts being a gradient that runs through all of nature.

This is the part where my lifelong reading list lights up. Aldous Huxley argued in The Doors of Perception in 1954 that the brain is a “reducing valve,” a filter that narrows the firehose of cosmic consciousness down to the trickle a primate body can survive on. The French philosopher Henri Bergson made essentially the same argument fifty years before Huxley, in Matter and Memory.

William James, the founder of American psychology, proposed in 1898 that the brain might be a transmissive organ rather than a productive one, the way a radio is a transmissive instrument for music it doesn’t generate.

And my late friend Joseph Chilton Pearce, in books like The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and The Biology of Transcendence (I wrote the foreword to Crack, and was lucky enough to spend many evenings sitting with Joe before he died) kept making the case that human awareness isn’t something the skull manufactures, it’s something the skull-and-heart together tune into.

None of those people were considered scientists in good standing. Most got dismissed as poets or mystics or romantics. And now here’s Christof Koch, in 2026, telling a room full of his fellow neuroscientists that they may have been right all along.

It matters that this is happening now. We’re in a moment when artificial intelligence is suddenly forcing everyone to ask, out loud and a little nervously, what consciousness even is, and whether a sufficiently complicated machine might have some.

That question can’t be answered until we have an honest theory of consciousness in the first place, and the materialist theory we inherited from the nineteenth century isn’t up to the job. So the door is opening. The wisdom traditions, the ones we used to call primitive or premodern, get to walk back in.

What does any of this have to do with how you live tomorrow morning? Quite a lot, actually. If consciousness is something you participate in rather than something your brain secretes like bile, then attention is sacred.

The hours you spend doomscrolling are hours of awareness leaked back into a feed that doesn’t love you. The minutes you spend in silence, in nature, in a real conversation with another human being where both of you put your phones face-down on the table, are minutes when something fundamental in the universe gets to come awake through you.

The contemplative traditions, every one of them, have been telling us this for thousands of years. Sit. Breathe. Pay attention. The Buddhists call it mindfulness. The Christians call it contemplative prayer. Indigenous peoples call it being on the land. They aren’t different practices. They’re the same practice in different vocabularies.

And if Koch is right, the materialism that’s been quietly running our civilization since Descartes, the assumption that nature is dead matter to be managed and that mind is a fluke of biology, is wrong in a way that has consequences. It’s the philosophical engine room of strip-mining and factory farming and treating each other like consumer units.

If consciousness is woven into the fabric of things, then the river really is a relative, the forest really is a community, and the person across from you really is, at some level, made of the same inwardness you’re made of. That’s not poetry. That’s what the math is starting to say, and Native people have been trying to tell us for centuries.

I’d love to know what you think. If you’ve ever had an experience that didn’t fit the meat-computer story, a moment of inexplicable knowing, a presence you couldn’t account for, a goodbye from someone whose brain shouldn’t have been working, please share it in the comments.

The wisdom traditions kept this data safe for thousands of years by people swapping these stories around fires. We can do the same thing in this corner of Substack. And if you haven’t yet read Huxley or William James or Joe Pearce on this question, do yourself the favor. The future of science may turn out to look a lot like the deepest parts of the past.

The Wisdom School: What it Means to be Human is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

ArthurYoung.com > Organizations > Institute for the Study of Consciousness

• Purpose
• Our evolution of wisdom (shown in the ISC Logo)
• Where you come in
• Theory of Process “ToP” Poster
• Who’s doing what & contacts

Purpose

Founded by Arthur M. Young in 1972, the Institute for the Study of Consciousness (“ISC”) continues to use Young’s Theory of Process (“ToP”) as a paradigm to orient people toward the turning points of human evolution. This paradigm integrates materialist determinism in Science with free will, and thus gives a formal place for values and spiritual purpose to be recognized as part of reality, reclaiming purpose within science is our purpose. We see this integration as essential to a science of everything, and helping us live up to our full potential and fulfill our species’ name: Sapiens = wise ones.

Our Evolution of Wisdom

According to Young’s Theory of Process, as outlined in his book The Reflexive Universe, evolution is not just genetics: we are acting in the larger context of transcendent freedom leading to new creations. The Reflexive Universe view organizes and interrelates fields of inquiry with three categorically different evolutions:

genes

instinct

wisdom

Darwin’s theory of evolution predicted a mechanism of physical inheritance, which eventually was found in genes. A means of recording what is learned from experience is highly valuable for evolution. Young’s Theory of Process posits: The instincts which express what was learned are not recorded in the genes, even though associated with them; instinct is a different category of evolution. How behavioral instincts are recorded may take time to discover, just as the ongoing research and discovery of how genes work has taken generations.

Each category of evolution is symbolized in our logo by three triangles colored yellow, aqua, or white respectively, one atop the other, instinct on top of genetics, and wisdom over instinct. The three triangles point down to one point at the middle of seven points on the whole circle.

We humans are not always compulsively following our animal instincts, and we are not entirely determined by our genes; on the contrary, we can creatively use determinist laws to transcend limits. Discovering the principles operating in the universe empowers inventive creation. As Young showed with his perfection of the Bell helicopter as a vertical flying machine, we can have flight by creative leaps with clever devices, and do not need to be the wings, as animals do who evolved feathers from generations of genetic trials. And unlike other animals such as the bird, which has its wings, but cannot also have arms and hands, we can take on new abilities and new identities like clothing. This is categorically different from both genetic and instinctual evolution, and deserves recognition in any theory of the universe. Titles for this creative power are: consciousness, understanding, and wisdom. Scientific study, testing, empathy, direct recognition, and intuition all contribute to the evolution of consciousness; all these and more may be needed for Wisdom to emerge.

Arthur Young gave the title of “Dominion” to the final “Kingdom” of evolution in consciousness. He did not mean domination nor enslaving nor exploiting. He meant the more mature expressions of dominion, including comprehensive mastery and wisdom. We may all hope that learning mastery in each virtue involves fewer violations of others, and leads to more symbiosis, less domination. Therefore, some renditions of this Theory of Process may label the seventh stage as “Transcendence” or “Transcendent,” or “Attainment,” instead of “Dominion,” to be more understandable by current culture. Transcendence does not mean escapism. People will repeatedly find there is no escape from responsibility; when seeing comprehensively enough, the compassion of wisdom impels action to help all embodiments of evolution and to heal the whole.

This theory (ToP) assists in predicting jumps which break away from history and trends in any development. By seeing the patterns of similarities across all phenomena, in terms of stages and substages, each example of the pattern informs across any scale of view, from personal to global. Fractals are a visual representation of this self-mapping feature. “As above, so below” is another way this has been expressed.

Because people can exercise freedom, exact prediction of individuals and groups is not possible; however, the general nature of any process, and what qualities are available next, can be anticipated with the Theory of Process. Marshall Rosenberg, in his explanation of Non-Violent Communication, predicted for any group, the parties must first fully hear and acknowledge the validity of each person’s feelings and generic longings (ToP stage 2 “Binding”) before they can agree on plans (ToP stage 3 “Identity”). Only when the emotional level has been resolved first will the participants experience this moment of mutual acceptance as a breakthrough, or jump in progress. A recognition of sequence requirements is central to the Theory of Process, in this case the recognition that stage 2 must be complete before stage 3 can work. This is an example of the predictive usefulness of theory.

We emphasize how these 7 stages of process and the recursive sub-stages within each stage are a theory, a mental map or model, not the thing itself.This formalism distinguishes categorical types of things and non-things (such as subjective and projective realities). Arthur Young coined the use of the term “projective” to elucidate the nature of our subjective experience and mental process of modeling the universe. While we can specify these conceptual details objectively for all to see, we should always remember it is we who project theories onto more vast realities, and theory cannot be interchanged with the 3 other kinds of realities:

• Objective physical sensations resulting from actions,
• The apprehending of purposes, and
• The experience of emotion/ motivation.

Young was inspired by the universal patterning embodied in atomic elements, he expanded on that to form a diagram he called The Grid: The entire Periodic Table of Elements is the third row of a higher order of the same periodicity. He called all the rows “Kingdoms” because the entities of the next 3 rows after the Atomic were already commonly known as belonging in the “Mineral kingdom, Plant kingdom, & Animal Kingdom” to which he added another “Kingdom” to complete the pattern and account for all the qualities we partake of. Each row (“Kingdom”) cumulatively engages in new kinds of evolution, as explained regarding the ISC logo, above. Thus this final “Kingdom” is engaged in developing wisdom for Transcendent power.

Where you come in

The powers inherent in cultural accumulation of knowledge and techniques can prove quite dangerous, especially without wisdom. The challenge represented by the atomic bomb is to ‘wise up or die out.’ The co-founder of this Institute for the Study of Consciousness, Ruth Forbes Young, was so moved by this imperative, she also co-founded what is now the International Peace Institute.

Arthur Young’s Theory of Process gives a scientifically precise map of universal processes which includes the evolution that matters most to us:

Human Consciousness

You have active roles in human evolution to live up to the wisdom implied by our taxonomic name Homo Sapiens. One role is within your self, having a drive to learn and grow your own competence. Another role is as a contributor to the collective adventure of conscious transcendence of past compulsions. It could be by freeing people from being blindly run by fears generally, or dispelling war, greed addictions, or the consequent violations against life; your help may be the tipping force for life to continue in creative diversity on Earth.

As examples, we should stop irrevocable actions such as:

• Releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment, irreversibly changing gene pools; if a particular GMO is found to be harmful, it will then be too late
• Fracking for oil by releasing chemicals known to be toxic solvents into our Earth;

We do know better by now, and should use the precautionary principle in handling the fundaments of life, which are millions of times older than science!

Gaining an overview and understanding of this adventure of consciousness is useful and satisfying in itself, but also leads into a journey of applying paradigms to create desired futures.

Exemplars of that journey include the famous Geodesic dome inventor Buckminster Fuller and visionary futurist Foster Gamble. Before Foster produced Thrive, he studied the Theory of Process at this ISC. He assessed that “Bucky” Fuller comprehended the fundamental structure of the universe with what Bucky coined as the “vector equilibrium.” (a geometric shape also known as the closest packing of spheres). Foster recognized Arthur Young as comprehending the process of universal unfolding with the torus model and believes the process/structure combination forms the most complete picture of the universe yet attained by cumulative systematic inquiry.

Foster’s revelations are visible in his movies Thrive 1 and Thrive II and website (12 spheres around one inside a torus), but these background theoretical models and organizing principles are not directly explained there; this is where your study and journey can take off.

Discover where you are in the adventure of consciousness!

We recommend you explore this ArthurYoung.com website, read some of the free essays about the Theory, and view the Arthur Young videos.

We are open to critique and to comparing views which can add to, or revise our paradigm scientifically. Just providing us with other data to consider is appreciated. Comparing theories and the merits of various paradigms is in the Charter of this Institute for the Study of Consciousness.

The Theory of Process Poster

The ISC, with funding and support from Anodos Foundation and the editorial and graphic resources of The Grove Consultants International, has produced a 20 x 30 inch color waterproof poster that serves as a primer, introduction, summary, and graphic display of the Theory of Process (“ToP”). The Poster includes background about Arthur Young, a brief outline of the theory, and graphics of the following features: The Grid, the Learning Cycle, the Rosetta Stone of Meaning, a table of correspondences to the four levels, and several Arcs of Process illustrating diverse applications of the seven-stages of process. The Poster provides a coherent, beautiful, succinct, and accessible quick reference about ToP at your fingertips. This Poster is what you will want to have with you when you suddenly get the urge to tell someone about the Theory of Process and its power.

The Poster is available flat, or folded into a convenient hand-size of 7.5 inch x 10 inch. As it is unfolded, each of the 4 levels of the ToP is exemplified in a new modality for the page.Order the Theory of Process Poster – $15

Wholesale customers or educators wishing to use the poster for student or classroom use, please contact Jack Engstrom: engstrom@lisco.com

If you send us your email address, c/o Jack Engstrom: engstrom@lisco.com, we can keep you informed of ISC news and events. We will not distribute your email address.