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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.
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…
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.
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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 TheReflexive 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 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.
Essentia Foun • Dec 31, 2023 Our brains do not produce consciousness, they ‘filter’ it and consciousness is related to the higher dimensions in string theory. In this thought provoking conversation, distinguished Professor of mathematics and astronomy Bernard Carr explains his theory of consciousness and psi-phenomena. 00:00 Introduction 05:02 How did you get involved with parapsychology? 09:41 Bernard on trying to weigh a soul… 13:50 Is psychical research science? 16:03 The Enfield poltergeist claim 25:59 Are Psi phenomena real? 26:58 On the importance of true skepticism 28:55 Where are we in studying these phenomena scientifically? 34:44 Is having a scientific background a hindrance or a help when it comes to studying these phenomena? 38:55 In what sense are most scientists not ‘believing’ the phenomena? 43:54 On a post materialist science 44:38 How does your notion of time relate to psi phenomena? 53:16 What is the relationship between time and consciousness? 1:01:10 Is time real? 1:04:20 What is the specious presence? 1:06:38 You might argue planet earth is conscious 1:09:16 On the experience of time when falling 1:11:56 When the specious present seems to expand 1:15:51 How does the concept of the specious present explain certain psychic phenomena? 1:19:11 Natalia on the slowing down of time when falling off a mountain 1:23:17 Bernard on the movies Inception and Interstellar 1:24:44 Is time just a dial on our dashboard of perception? 1:27:25 When you either experience an eternal now or an eternal always… 1:28:00 On experiencing the transcendence of space and time 1:30:07 How do you interact with the world when you are in a different specious present? 1:32:53 How athletes are successful due to a specious present that is slowed down 1:33:58 What if our specious present is expanding? 1:37:02 Bernards view on the fine tuning problem 1:41:11 On the multiverse 1:42:47 Is there something before the Big Bang? 1:47:34 Hawking’s theory about the origin of time 1:50:59 There must be a genesis of the universe right? 1:52:06 God and the Big Bang 1:54:44 What is consciousness to you? 1:57:12 Are there actually ‘laws’ of physics? 2:01:32 Is a final theory possible? 2:05:08 How to fit consciousness -per definition the first person experience- into science which is about the third person experience? 2:11:16 How to make a new physics that accommodates consciousness testable?
In the midst of all the negative trends that are so shaping American culture at the moment there is what I consider to be not only an emerging positive trend, but one which is going to fundamentally change our society and all human societies. The matrix of consciousness is beginning to become an essential part of our view of the world It is going to take time but this is where we are headed. That’s good news as we end the year.
Koko The gorilla talking with a human friend about the pussy cat she is holding. Credit: BBC
For most of the Judaea-Christian epoch of history the view of most Western societies was that we, humanity, were separate from the rest of creation and had dominion over the earth, as if it were an exploitable bank account left us by a rich uncle. As the Bible frames it, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”1 And in a sense we have had dominion and done a very poor job of it, as the impending collapse of the ecosystems of earth, air, and water make clear.
French philosopher Rene´ Descartes in 1637, writing, “Cogito ergo sum. (“I think, therefore I am.”)2 set the tone of science when he said that only people can think; […]
Area 23a • Aug 4, 2021 WWW.AREA23A.COM/AWARE NOW AVAILABLE ON VIDEO ON DEMAND (Apple TV, Amazon, GooglePlay) and WORLDWIDE VIRTUAL THEATER featuring exclusive q&as One Night for Consciousness Q&A Live post-screening discussion features Jack Kornfield, Author, and Buddhist Teacher; Directors Frauke Sandig & Eric Black; Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., Director, Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research; Monica Gagliano, Professor of Plant Behavior & Cognition, University of Sydney, and other special guests. Global Live Stream (European Premiere) Q&A Live post-screening discussion with Directors Frauke Sandig & Eric Black; Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., Director, Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research; Monica Gagliano, Professor of Plant Behavior & Cognition, University of Sydney; and Dr. med. Andrea Jungaberle Medical Director OVID Clinics I Co-founder of MIND Foundation. Moderator: Amir Giles, Co-Director, Psychedelic Society. 100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes! “The most moving and beautiful depiction of deep understanding of consciousness and of who we are that I have seen depicted through film.” -Jack Kornfield, author and Buddhist teacher “Stirs feelings of awe and wonder, humility and connection. A remarkable film.” – Valerie Kalfrin, Alliance of Women Film Journalists “Consciousness-elevating food for thought.” – Michael Rechtschaffen, Los Angeles Times “Stunningly Deep, Wise and Visually Arresting, the most Mind-Blowing Film the Maui Film Festival has presented in Twenty Years! -Barry Rivers Maui Film Festival Founder/Director WINNER OF THE FEATURE COMPETITION JURY PRIZE, 2021 ILLUMINATE FILM FESTIVAL TAKE A THOUGHT-PROVOKING, MIND-BLOWING CINEMATIC JOURNEY INTO THE OCEAN OF CONSCIOUSNESS. What is consciousness? Is it in all living beings? What happens when we die? Why do we seem to be hardwired for mystical experience? Aware follows six brilliant researchers who approach our greatest mysteries from radically different viewpoints. High-tech brain research and Eastern meditation, psychedelics, and the consciousness of plants help us see the world anew, challenge our beliefs, and maybe even initiate our own journey into the unknown. Cast: Roland Griffiths, the renowned Johns Hopkins University psychedelics researcher, plant biologist Monica Gagliano, Christof Koch, Chief Scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the famed Tibetan Buddhist monks, Matthieu Ricard and Mingyur Rinpoche, and acclaimed author, Richard Boothby. AWARE is the second in the trilogy following Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth, selected for over 100 international film festivals. AWARE is the winner of the Feature Competition Jury Prize at the Illuminate Film Festival and is currently shortlisted for the LOLA, the German Academy Awards. Directed by Frauke Sandig and Eric Black Website: https://aware-film.com/ Facebook: / awaremovie
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?
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 × 1016. 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.
“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.”
“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.
I’m a mainstream PhD physicist / biophysicist / AI guy. But IMO self-aware consciousness, the experiential sense we are ‘souls’, is so vivid and profound, yet so underrated by some that . .
. . I’m prepared to at least entertain the incredible, that we may be living a layer above base-level reality, that this universe is in some sense not real.
As Elon Musk muses occasionally.
Why? Plenty of physicists, information theorists and philosophers have pointed out there are hints the universe is simulation-like, a game even.
And because we can’t even come close to touching consciousness mechanistically. Consciousness is not – contrary to some claims – currently explained by any physical, biological or information theory mechanism.
At least, not in this level of reality.
Quantum mechanics and its fundamentally probabilistic nature is suggestive of a computation-minimizing mechanism.
The real universe’s way to save on ‘CPU’ and ‘memory’.
Wave-function collapse is like ‘just-in-time’ rendering.
The Planck scale is like the screen resolution of space-time.
And then there’s the mystery of ‘hard consciousness’ itself, how to explain the fact we humans have this sense that we’re a . . soul.
It’s no surprise consciousness researchers barely talk about this. It’s kinda embarrassing.
They focus on looking for neural correlates.
But maybe the simulation guys – and the theists are – in effect, right? And, on the other side, we’re souls of some kind?
It certainly feels like we are.
Who knows what the ‘science’ is on the other ‘side’?
Just another consequence of physics?
Many researchers (but not all) go immediately hook-line-and-sinker materialistic assuming consciousness is just another mystery to explain like e.g. lightning or breathing or eclipses.
Or that it’s ‘just an illusion’.
But, no, consciousness is VERY different.
In all other cases the mysteries, the ‘magic’ of the past were guessable, at least potentially, to be something physical, not too different from the truth.
Even if they initially got it wrong.
Think of e.g. lightning, breathing or eclipses.
Lightning was a burst of light . . in appearance . . and in reality. (The mechanism turned out to be electricity.)
Biological life was a collection of physical matter that was automated, and could breath in and out or pump blood, extract nutrients . . physical in appearance and . . in reality. (The mechanism was biology, parts of our body that used energy and microscopic machines to operate, the ancients couid see the body internals were physical mechanisms comprising pumps and air and liquid piping and processing systems, they couid actually find the physical systems, evident every time they gutted an animal).
Eclipses were a thing getting in the way of another thing . . in appearance . . And in reality. (The mechanism was crossing orbits.)
These were all arguably physical from the get go, despite the near endless mystery and miraculous explanations from some of our forefathers.
Sitting around the camp fire in eons past they arguably could have come pretty close to not too dissimilar gross answers to reality.
Just no way to prove it at the time.
But consciousness seems non-physical
This time the ‘magic’ seems impossible to even hypothesise on. By the best scientific minds.
The fact that some scientists are actually proposing that consciousness is ‘fundamental’, almost like in Star Wars, possessed in some form by almost everything?
That’s been labelled pseudo-science by neuroscientists and highlights why the simulation hypothesis is not actually as crazy or unnecessary or luxurious as it sounds.
The simulation hypothesis is proposed for good reasons. And consciousness IMO is a serious yet surprising contender for perhaps the strongest evidence yet.
Because it was always starring us in the face.
But a little too ever-present to be talked about in scientific circles.
A little too ‘religious’.
Atoms that . . ‘feel’
Why is something made of atoms feeling something? Thoughts. Pain. The full visual field. Colors. Again: pain.
The study of neural correlates of consciousness arguably uncovers ‘necessaries’, not ‘sufficients’. These capabilities would be required even for non-sentient so-called ‘philosophical zombies’ for survival and external function.
And if it’s just an illusion, why is something having an illusion in the first place?
Consciousness, from the get go, appears beyond physical.
At the very least layers of reality or even God should be seriously entertained. Rather than virtually shunned as ‘unscientific’ because it’s ‘dualistic’.
Yet, how unscientific not to even consider it?
After all, we’re prepared to entertain a quantum foam of multi-universes.
Around a third of physicists believe in the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Why not layers of reality? As per the simulation hypothesis?
And in the last layer, our consciousnesses are . . mechanistic.
Don’t forget, lots of evidence is building up that the universe is simulation-like . .
It’s crazy to leave it off the table.
At the very least it’s time that consciousness was not brushed away as almost ‘not even a thing’.
Let’s not be fooled by its pervasiveness.
And, scientifically, who knows what more evidence of the simulation hypothesis there is to . . hack?
PhD physicist / AI engineer into GPT, startups, EVs, green energy, space, physics, biomed, global good, futurism | Founder Pretzel Technologies, Melbourne AU
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