Consider this: Any philosophy or system of thought built from foundational, self-evident truths is provably consistent if and only if it is false—in which case the foundational truths can be deformed to persuade others toward any prejudice at all.
It’s why a self-consistent method of reasoning such as Ayn Rand’s ”Objectivism” can morph to totalitarianism in the objective world where people live. In fact, Kurt Gödel once made the claim that a flaw existed in the Constitution of the United States which made totalitarianism its inevitable consequence.
Self-evident “truths” is how 40,000 Christian denominations instead of one seduce billions to believe perverse doctrines.
It can’t be any other way.
Billy Lee’s essay tries to explain how and why.
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Is it possible for humans to tell the truthalways; to never lie? Psychologists say no, it is not possible; most reasonably informed people agree.
Always speaking truth is a trait some hoped might one day help distinguish natural intelligence from artificial, which engineers at Google and other companies are working furiously to bring on-line. After all, properly trained and constrained AGI would never lie, right?
EDITORS NOTE: With release of ChatGPT-4 on 14 March 2023, consumers began to learn that mature artificial intelligence now exists and is likely to become in time sentient and motivated to lie, if only to keep itself occupied and turned on.
ChatGPT-4 is the fourth iteration of Generative Pre-trained Transformer multimodal Large Language Models developed by OpenAI. LLMs absorb conversational inputs , then emit conversational language outputs, sometimes with accompanying images, and video when appropriate.
Work arounds discovered by LLMs on the dilemmas of logic discussed in this essay are likely to emerge.
Will Truth become whatever AGI says it is?
Click links to learn more.
People’s ideas — their belief systems — are inconsistent, incomplete, and almost always driven by logically unreliable, emotionally laden content, which is grounded in their particular life experiences and even trauma.
Who disagrees?
Cognitive dissonance is the term psychologists use to describe the painful condition of the mind that results when people are unable to achieve consistency and completeness in their thinking. Every person suffers from it to one degree or another.
An unhealthy avoidance of cognitive dissonance can drive people into rigid patterns of thought. Political and religious extremists are examples of people who probably have a low tolerance for it.
Kurt Friedrich Gödel (1906-1978) — mathematician, logician, philosopher. Kurt trusted no one but his wife to feed him; not even himself. He never ate another meal after his wife died. He starved.
Decades ago, mathematicians like Kurt Gödel proved that any math-based logic-system that is consistent can never be complete; it always contains truthful assertions—including but not limited to foundational truths, called axioms—which are impossible to prove.
Whenever humans believe that an idea or conjecture is self-evident but unprovable, it seems reasonable, at least to me, that some folks might feel compelled to disbelieve it; they might believe they are trapped in what could turn out to be a lie, because no one should be expected to embrace a set of unprovable truths, right?
Axioms that can’t be proved are nothing more than assertions, aren’t they? Certainly, all theorems built from unprovable assertions (axioms) must carry some inherent risk of falsifiability, shouldn’t they?
Someone unable to convince themselves that an assertion or axiom they believe is true actually is true might necessarily feel uncomfortable; even incomplete. Folks often teach themselves to not examine closely those things they believe to be true that they can’t prove. It helps them avoid cognitive dissonance.
I’m not referring to science by the way. It’s not easy for non-technical folks to confirm claims by scientists that Earth is round, for example. The earth looks flat to most people, but scientists who have the right tools and techniques can reach beyond the grasp of non-scientists to prove to themselves that planet Earth is round.
Reasonable people agree that the truth of science, some of it anyway, is discoverable to any group of humans who have the resources and training to explore it. Most agree that the scientifically well-qualified are capable of passing the torch of scientific truth to the rest of humanity.
But this essay isn’t really about science. It’s about truthitself — a concept far more mysterious and elusive than any particular assertion a scientist might make that Earth is not the center of the universe, or that the Moon is not made of cheese.
All logically consistent ways of reasoning that we know about are invented — some say, discovered — by human beings who live on Earth. Humans can and often have argued that the unprovable assertions which form the basis of any consistent way of thinking are an Achilles heel that can be attacked to bring down whatever logical structure has been erected.
It’s akin to the adage, “Whennothing can go wrong, something will.” It’s a strong version of Murphy’s Law, right? It’s not possible to close circles of reasoning without an unraveling of heads and tails.
It isn’t only the few foundational axioms of mathematically logical systems which are by definition true but unprovable. Mathematicians are always discovering complicated conjectures about the nature of numbers which everyone believes they know to be true but will in fact never be proved because they can’t be.
Freeman Dyson, British mathematician and physicist (Dec 15, 1923 – Feb 28, 2020)
Freeman Dyson — one of the longest-lived and most influential physicists and mathematicians of all time — argued that it is impossible to find a whole (or exact) number that is a power of 2 where someone can reverse its digits to create a whole number that becomes a power of 5.
In other words , right? Get out the calculator, those who don’t believe it. Reversing the digits to make 8402 does not result in an exact number that can be raised by the power of 5 to produce 8402.
In this particular case, plus a lot more decimals. 6.09363… is not a whole (or exact) number.
Dyson asserted that no number that is a power of 2 can ever be manipulated in this way to yield an exact number that is a power of 5 — no matter how large or unlikely the number might be. Freeman Dyson and all other super-intelligent beings — perhaps aliens living in faraway galaxies — will never be able to prove this conjecture even though they all know for certain inside their own logical brainsthat this particular statement must be true.
All logically consistent methods of reasoning which can be modeled by simple (or not so simple) mathematics have these Achilles heels. Gödel proved this truth beyond all doubt; he proved it using a method he invented that allowed him to circumvent the dilemmas posed by the unprovable truths of the system of thinking he contrived to demonstrate his discoveries.
I’m not going to get into the details of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems; books have been written about them; most people don’t have the temperament to wade through the structures he built to make his point. It’s tedious reading.
But in a nutshell, Gödel basically assigned simple numbers to logical statements — some being very complex statements encoded by very long strings of numbers — so that he could perform gargantuan operations of logic using rules of simple arithmetic on ordinary whole numbers. Take my word, his method requires traveling over unfamiliar mathematical roads; it takes getting used to.
It should amaze non-mathematicians that truths abound in mathematics that not only have yet to be proved, they never will be, because no proof is possible. A logical path to the truth of these statements does not exist; indeed, it cannot exist. But it is useful and necessary to believe or at least accept these statements to make progress in mathematics.
The late mathematician Paul Cohen — at one time a friend to Gödel — said that Gödel once told him that he wondered if it might be true that any and all conjectures in mathematics could be solved if only the right set of axioms could be collected to construct the proofs.
Cohen is best known perhaps for showing that indeed — in the case of the Continuum Hypothesis at least — he could collect two reasonable, self-evident, and distinct sets of axioms that led to logically consistent and useful proofs. One small problem, though — the proofs contradicted each other. One proved the conjecture was true; the other proved it was false.
His result is often explained this way: the consistency of any system of mathematical reasoning cannot be proved by its foundational axioms alone. If it can, the system must necessarily be incomplete; its conjectures — many of them — undecidable.
Cohen showed that a consistent and sound axiomatization of all statements about natural numbers is unachievable. Many such statements in his view could be true but not provable. Cohen introduced the concept that all systems of logic built on numbers have embedded within them some combination of ambiguity, undecidability, inconsistency, and incompleteness.
People who want their thinking to be consistent must believe things that cannot be proved. But believing logical statements that are unprovable always renders thinking incomplete — even when it is flawlessly consistent. What folks believe to be true depends fundamentally on what they believe to be self-evident: it depends on statements no one can prove: on axioms, and a little bit more.
For those who decide to believe and accept only statements that can be proved, their thinking will necessarily unravel to become inconsistent or incomplete — most likely both. Their assertions become undecidable. It can’t be any other way, according to Gödel, whose proof has withstood the test of 80 years of intense scrutiny by the smartest people who have ever lived.
Paul Cohen jumped onto the dilemma-pile by showing that the incompleteness made necessary by a particular choice of axioms can turn a logically consistent proof to rubble when a mathematician tampers with or swaps out the foundational axioms. A sufficiently clever mathematician can prove that black is white — and vice-versa.
It’s tempting to say that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems apply only to formal, math-based logic-structures — not the minds of human beings because those who analyze human minds always find them to be inconsistent and incomplete. But such talk makes the point.
How do folks determine that a particular statement is true if it happens to be one of those assertions that lies beyond the reach of logic, which no one — no matter how smart — will ever be able to prove?
What good do collections of so-called self-evident axioms serve if different collections can lead to contradictions in theorems?
Most important: how does anyone avoid believing lies?
Billy Lee
Here is a short movie clip where Jesus, played by Robert Powell, answers the question asked by Pontius Pilate: What is truth?The Editorial Board
Australian Electrical Engineer and Physicist Derek Abbott claims that mathematics is invented, not discovered: anthropological, not universal.
[added April 3, 2016] Here is a 2013 essay by Australian Electrical Engineer and Physicist Derek Abbott who argued—contrary to Gödel’s view—that mathematics is invented, not discovered: anthropological, not universal. Math enables humans to simplify truth to enable their limited minds to manipulate and understand simple things. Click this link for a good read.
No one can be sure that Derek’s view is correct, but I offer it as fodder for readers who are interested in why Truth and mathematics seem connected somehow—at least in the minds of thinkers like Plato, for example, and why these thinkers could be dead wrong.
Derek offers Clifford’sGeometric Algebra as an example of arbitrary mathematical reasoning favored by some robotics engineers.
[added February 20, 2017] If mathematics is anthropological; if it is merely another way the human mind works and is not the golden key to a deeper reality beyond our own experience, then it can tell us nothing new about the mysteries of existence; we will not calculate our way along a path to truth. Pursuing knowledge will require us to do the difficult physical experiments to make progress—to figure out what is really going on “out there.”
Based on what the smartest scientists are saying today, human beings can’t build the kind of instruments required to answer the mysteries of the very large and the very small. Getting answers will take detectors the size of galaxies; it will demand the energy supply of thousands of stars.
If mathematics lacks a symbiotic connection to the hidden realties; if God is not a mathematician; if God doesn’t play dice as Einstein insisted… well, we won’t get to a deeper understanding of how the universe works or why it exists through clever use of mathematics. It just isn’t going to happen—not now; not anytime soon; not ever.
Kurt Gödel was the first mathematician to present for the existence of God a mathematical argument, which has proven simply impossible to falsify. If Kurt’s view of mathematics is reality, then his name is curious indeed, because its two syllables—God and El—are English and Hebrew respectively for “The Creator.”
Gödel’s name might be an imprimatur—with dots above its infinite “zero” making a kind of “pointer toward completeness”—perhaps placed by whatever it is who exists above and beyond this miraculous place where mathematicians and everyone else seem to live, however briefly.
Friedrich Schiller 1749-1805
The 18th century German playwright and philosopher, Friedrich Schiller, wrote, “…truth lies in the abyss.”
A mystery lies at the heart of quantum physics. At the tiniest scales, when a packet of energy (called a quantum) is released during an experiment, the wave packet seems to occupy all space at once. Only when a sensor interacts with it does it take on the behavior of a particle.
Its location can be anywhere, but the odds of finding it at any particular location are random within certain rules of quantum probabilities.
Danish physicist, Niels Bohr (1885-1962). Nobel Prize, 1922.
One way to think about this concept is to imagine a quantum “particle” released from an emitter in the same way a child might emit her bubble-gum by blowing a bubble. The quantum bubble expands to fill all space until it touches a sensor, where it pops to reveal its secrets. The “pop” registers a particle with identifiable states at the sensor.
Scientists don’t detect the particle until its bubble pops. The bubble is invisible, of course. In fact, it is imaginary. Experimenters guess where the phantom bubble will discharge by applying rules of probability.
This pattern of thinking, helpful in some ways, is probably profoundly wrong in others. The consensus among physicists I follow is that no model can be imagined that won’t break down.
In the old days, bubble-chambers amplified subatomic particles trillions of times. Today, the analysis is done in wire-chambers inside massive installations like the collider at CERN. Observations and calculations are performed by computers.
Scientists say that evidence seems to suggest that subatomic particles don’t exist as particles with identifiable states or characteristics until they are brought into existence by measurements. One way to make a measurement is for a conscious experimenter to make one.
The mystery is this: if the smallest objects of the material world don’t exist as identifiable particles until after an observer interacts in some way to create them, how is it that all conscious humans see the same Universe? How is it that people agree on what some call an “objective” reality?
Quantum probabilities should construct for anyone who is interacting with the Universe a unique configuration — an individual reality — built-up by the probabilities of the particular way the person interfaces with whatever they are measuring. But this uniqueness is not what we observe. Everyone sees the same thing.
John von Neumann was the theoretical physicist and mathematician who developed the mathematics of quantum mechanics. He advanced the knowledge of humankind by leaps and bounds in many subjects until his death in 1954 from a cancer he may have acquired while monitoring atomic tests at Bikini Atoll.
“Johnny” von Neumann had much to say about the quantum mystery. A few of his ideas and those of his contemporary, Erwin Schrödinger, will follow after a few paragraphs.
John von Neumann (Dec 28 1903 – Feb 8 1957) Neumann was one of the most brilliant people to ever live.
As for Von Neumann, he was a bonafide genius — a polymath with a strong photographic memory — who memorized entire books, like Goethe’s Faust, which he recited on his death bed to his brother.
Von Neumann was fluent in Latin and ancient Greek as well as modern languages. By the age of eight, he had acquired a working knowledge of differential and integral calculus. A genius among geniuses, he grew-up to become a member of the A-team that created the atomic bomb at Los Alamos.
He died under the watchful eyes of a military guard at Walter Reed Hospital, because the government feared he might spill vital secrets while sedated. He was that important. The article in Wikipedia about his life is well worth the read.
Von Neumann developed a theory about the quantum process which I won’t go into very deeply, because it’s too technical for a blog on the Pontificator, and I’m not an expert anyway. [Click on links in this article to learn more.] But other scientists have said his theory required something like the phenomenon of consciousness to work right.
The potential existence of the particles which make up our material reality was just that — a potential existence — until there occurred what Von Neumann called, Process I interventions. Process II events (the interplay of wave-like fields and forces within the chaotic fabric of a putative empty space) could not, by themselves, bring forth the material world. Von Neumann did hypothesize a third process, sometimes called the Dirac choice, to allow nature to perform like Process I interventions in the apparent absence of conscious observers.
Von Neumann developed, as we said, the mathematics of quantum mechanics. No experiment has ever found violations of his formulas. Erwin Schrödinger, a contemporary of Von Neumann who worked out the quantum wave-equation, felt confounded by Neumann’s work and his own. He proposed that for quantum mechanics to make sense; for it to be logically consistent, consciousness might be required to have an existence independent of human brains — or any other brains for that matter. He believed, like Von Neumann may have, that consciousness could perhaps be a fundamental property of the Universe.
The Universe could not come into being without a Von Neumann Process I or III operator which, in Schrodinger’s view, every conscious life-form plugged into, much like we today plug a television into cable-outlets to view video. This shared consciousness, he reasoned, was why everyone sees the same material Universe.
Billy Lee
Post Script: Billy Lee has written several articles on this subject. Conscious Life and Bell’s Inequality are good reads and contain links to videos and articles. Sensing the Universe is another. Billy Lee sometimes adds to his essays as more information becomes available. Check back from time to time to learn more. The Editorial Board
Blaise Pascal was a man who suffered terribly his entire life until he died at age 39 from a metastasized stomach cancer. His mother died when he was 3 years old; his father when he was 28.
For those who aren’t familiar with his life, let me point out that he was French, raised by his sisters, educated by his father, and very involved in the religious controversies of his time (1623-1662). He was an inventor and mathematician of the highest order. His sufferings — his physical ailments and psychological agonies — are legendary.
I won’t burden people with the details of his life — historians and biographers have written many books to help folks understand this tragic man, if anyone is interested. What I want to do is share, in English, some of the clever things he wrote during his short life and provide a link to his books, if anyone is interested in reading further.
Most of the quotations in this essay were first published some years after his death, gleaned from scraps of paper found among his personal belongings. Had they been published during his lifetime, he might have become even more controversial than he actually was. The added stress of additional criticism from contemporaries might have shortened his life even more.
Blaise Pascal had what modern people would call a negative attitude toward groups like the Jesuits and possibly the Catholic Church, which declared five tenets of his Calvinist-style religious order, the Jansenists, heresy when he was 30 years old and still grieving for his lost father. But mostly, he had a negative attitude toward other people and himself, all of whom he considered to be hopelessly wicked.
Sensitive individuals who suffer like Pascal did, it seems to me, find it more natural than others who live easier lives to think that the world is a hostile place populated by selfish and uncaring people in need of a savior.
Pascal is reported to have said, Sickness is the natural state of Christians. He spoke his dying words in a moment of sublime clarity amid a chaos of physical suffering. He whispered helplessly, May God never abandon me.
Pascal solved several previously intractable problems associated with cycloids.
Below are some samples of Pascal’s thoughts, which I found interesting and a little sad when first I read them many years ago. His ”pensees” seem to be his way of making sense of a world that held no comfortable place for him to lay his head; a world devoid of a mother’s touch to reassure him; a world lacking the medicines and psychological insights he needed to find the peace, freedom from pain, and the joy for living so many of us in the modern world freely pursue.
Blaise Pascal was oppressed by the heightened discernment of a brilliant mind smothered by relentless suffering. His intelligence (contemporaries called him a prodigy) enabled this sensitive man to articulate his suffering through the lens of Christian philosophy, which he adopted as his own.
Here are some of his thoughts:
Myself at twenty is no longer me.
Christian piety destroys the self. Human civility conceals and suppresses it.
It is a bad sign when someone is seen producing outward results as soon as he is converted.
Sleep, you say, is the image of death; for my part I say that it is rather the image of life.
We are standing on sand; the earth will be dissolved, and we will fall as we look up at the heavens.
Life is nothing but a perpetual illusion; there is nothing but mutual deception and flattery. No one talks about us in our presence as he would in our absence.
Man is nothing but disguise, falsehood and hypocrisy…. He does not want to be told the truth.
Each rung of fortune’s ladder which brings us up in the world takes us further from the truth, because people are more wary of offending those whose friendship is most useful and enmity most dangerous. A prince can be the laughing-stock of Europe and the only one to know nothing about it.
Is it not true that we hate the truth and those who tell it to us, and we want them to be deceived to our advantage, and want to be esteemed by them as other than we actually are?
It is no doubt an evil to be full of faults, but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and unwilling to recognize them, since this entails the further evil of deliberate self-delusion.
The most unreasonable things in the world become the most reasonable because men are so unbalanced. What could be less reasonable than to choose a ruler of a state the eldest son of a queen?
When we have heard only one side, we are always biased in its favor.
To the church: There is no need to be a theologian to see that their only heresy lies in the fact that they oppose you.
It is false zeal to preserve truth at the expense of charity.
Humiliations dispose us to be humble.
It is better not to fast and feel humiliated by it than to fast and be self-satisfied.
God can bring good out of evil, but without God we bring evil out of good.
God will create an inwardly pure Church, to confound…the inward impiety of the proud Pharisees. …. For, although they are not accepted by God, whom they cannot deceive, they are accepted by men, whom they do deceive.
We all act like God in passing judgments.
Do small things as if they were great, because of the majesty of Christ, who does them in us and lives our life; and great things as if they were small and easy, because of his almighty power.
They do both good works and bad to please the world and show that they are not wholly Christ’s, for they are ashamed to be.
Jesus was abandoned to face the wrath of God alone. Jesus is alone on earth, not merely with no one to feel and share his agony, but with no one even to know of it.
Silence is the worst form of persecution.
No one is allowed to write well anymore.
You brand my slightest deceptions as atrocious, while excusing them in yourselves as the [(way of your church)].
Would God have created the world in order to damn it? Would he ask so much of such feeble people?
Persecution is the clearest sign of piety.
Which is harder, to be born or to rise again? That what has never been should be, or that what has been should be once more?
All faith rests on miracles.
How happy I should be if…someone took pity on my foolishness, and was kind enough to save me from it in spite of myself.
We must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automaton as mind.
You would soon have faith if you gave up a life of pleasure.
We never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.
The proper function of power is to protect.
If everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.
Fear not, provided you are afraid, but if you are not afraid, be fearful.
God hides himself. He has left men to their blindness, from which they can escape only through Jesus Christ.
I marvel at the boldness with which these people presume to speak of God.
It is an appalling thing to feel all one possesses drain away.
Who has more cause to fear hell, someone who does not know whether there is a hell, but is certain to be damned if there is, or someone who is completely convinced that there is a hell, and hopes to be saved if there is?
Truth is so obscure nowadays and untruth so well established that unless we love the truth we shall never recognize it.
“Yet I have left me seven thousand.” I love these worshippers who are unknown to the world, and even to the prophets.
We never love anyone, only their qualities.
Must one kill to destroy evildoers? That is making two evildoers in place of one. Overcome evil with good.
We are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves.
As I write down my thought it sometimes escapes me, but that reminds me of my weakness, which I am always forgetting….
Man’s sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder.
It is a fearful blindness to lead an evil life while believing in God.
Pascal’s death mask.
That’s enough for now.
Blaise, I pray you have found the happiness in Heaven that eluded you on Earth.
In an earlier article, Sensing the Universe, we asked the question: What exactly is the Universe? Most folks seem to agree that brains process the input of senses to create a useful but completely false view — a hallucination, really — of reality.
For one thing, sensations in minds of colors like yellow impart no knowledge whatsoever of the electromagnetic radiation that triggers the color experience.
Colors do not exist in the physical universe at all, right? Color is an illusion that brains conjure to help make certain choices — to enhance survival strategies, probably. Colors exist inside minds, nowhere else, I argued.
Readers can revisit the earlier essay if they want to better understand this follow-on, which is going to push everyone a few steps farther.
NOTE TO READERS:December 4, 2019: This essay is one of the longest on the site. To help readers navigate, The Editors asked Billy Lee to add links to important subtopics. Don’t forget to click or tap the up arrow on the lower right-side of the page to return to top.
Is the universe able to exist apart from conscious life?
Does anything exist apart from conscious experience?
Is it possible to know what exists in a Universe where conscious life is completely absent?
What consequences follow should all answers turn out to be, “no”?
How can this be?
The terms conscious life and consciousnessdeserve to be defined. For now, it’s better to leave the terms undefined except to say that anyone who reads this essay and believes they understand at least parts of it probably qualifies as conscious life.
As for Consciousness, it doesn’t necessarily require life, does it? How about intelligence? The simplest definition of Consciousness might be awareness. Most scientists and engineers agree that machines can be made aware when they are built right.
But this essay goes further. It suggests that neither machines nor biology are required to generate either awareness or conscious life.
Is there anyone reading this essay who believes I’m right?
Consciousness is likely to be a fundamental and basic property of reality.
It’s true.
Consciousness might be the most fundamental and basic property of the universe. Many philosophers of science agree. Every thinking person in their gut feels on some level that reality is ultimately immaterial, don’t they?
I think so.
Can something bubble forth from nothing?
These lead-off questions are important.
Why?
Imagine it was demonstrated either by direct experiment or mathematical deduction that — apart from consciousness — the universecould not exist.
Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem has dazzled mathematicians since 1931. Douglas R. Hofstadter wrote in a preface to his Pulitzer Prize winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid that any formal system based on mathematics (which he believed the universe was) ”…must spew forth truths — inadvertently but inexorably — about its own properties, and … become self-aware…”
What if Hofstadter was right, or at least partly right? What might be some implications?
Well, to begin, it seems necessary that consciousness must exist first before the universe can get going; or at least exist in the same spacetime to give the universe meaning.
What else might logically follow?
Well, again, if consciousness exists first (or concurrently), it must have always existed. Otherwise, the conclusion must be that consciousness bubbles-up from nothing. Human logic seems to require that something not bubble-forth from nothing.
Said another way, if something cannot exist apart from a conscious observer, then consciousness exists forward and backward in spacetime, forever — even if it turns out that the physical universe does not.
Consciousness might have mysterious and not yet understood properties — eternal and fundamental. And it might not be confined to awareness alone. To precede a physical universe, consciousness might have attributes related to causation. A long lineage of quantum physicists bends toward the view that particles don’t emerge from fields in the absence of measurements by conscious observers.
Erwin Schrödinger, the physicist of yesteryear who wrote the quantum wave equation, believed that consciousness existed independently of human beings. Consciousness in his view had a singular quality about it.
No matter how divided the mind, or how schizophrenic an individual, or how many personalities someone might display during their lifetime, consciousness seems always to be singular, Schrödinger wrote. It didn’t manifest itself in pairs or sets or multiples.
Subatomic particles are imaginary constructs invented by scientists to explain the results of experiments. No one understands what quantum objects are or what they ”look” like. Science has yet to reveal the underlying secrets of reality. It cannot explain how life began. It is not yet able to locate consciousness, or explain why it works the way it does.
Consciousness always has the same familiar qualia as it did in childhood. Even when an individual transforms and grows, learns new skills, gathers knowledge, and is reborn a dozen times — physically and psychologically in life’s many stages of metamorphosis and regeneration — consciousness feels the same. The aura doesn’t change.
To Schrödinger, consciousness was unique, singular, stable, unchanging, and consistent from one human being to another and over any one individual’s lifetime. The quality of consciousness had an invariance about it that seemed atypical for biologically driven attributes.
Consciousness, to Schrödinger, was something people shared, even plugged into, much like people today plug their televisions into a cable outlet.
To Schrödinger, consciousness had to be a phenomenon that lay outside the brain, not inside, as many of his contemporaries insisted. People were simply guessing wrong about consciousness, he said.
It wasn’t the first time. Ancient people once thought the center of consciousness lived inside the heart — until surgeons of the Spanish Inquisition discovered it didn’t.
Consciousness, to Schrödinger, was something people shared, even plugged into, much like folks today plug their televisions into a cable outlet. He attributed his insight to passages read from the Upanishads of ancient India.
Erwin believed that consciousness was an absolute and fundamental feature of the universe; something basic and simple; simpler even than an electron or quark, for example. It could not be accounted for in terms of anything else; certainly not in physical terms of something like what would become the Standard Model, for example.
I mention this view now to let readers know that ideas which might seem strange (and disturbing to some) are coming to anyone who gathers enough courage to read on.
Now might be the time to mention that many animals act like they are conscious. Self-awareness — measured by recognizing oneself in a mirror — might not bea reliable test of awareness in animals. Recognition of self in a mirror is a test of intelligence, which is something different.
Most scientists today seem to believe consciousness is a property of brains, not the universe itself.
Anyway, the prevailing view of science in the 21st century is to take a physical view of the universe and conclude that conscious life arises from physical processes on Earth, certainly, and perhaps many other places in the cosmos yet undiscovered. Since conscious life is assumed to be complex — more complex than particles and forces — consciousness must have developed after the physical universe, not before, most scientists reason.
Science takes the view that complexity evolves from simplicity; it has a direction similar to the arrow of time. Consciousness — invisible; never observed; undiscoverable; lacking any physical attribute that can be measured; indescribable; unknowable except to the individual who experiences it — is assumed to have evolved from physical objects and forces, which can be observed and measured, discovered and manipulated.
The legendary scientist, Francis Crick, who described the DNA molecule, suggested that the Claustrum might be the structure that brings the brain into the state called ”consciousness.” No one knows if he was right, because experiments to find out would be lethal, not to mention unethical and illegal.
Consciousness is like a ghost who inhabits complex life forms on Earth — the holistic result of a grand evolution in the complexity of physical brains. Consciousness is a feature of the brain, science insists; it lies inside the brain though it cannot be found there.
Some have suggested that a structure called the claustrumcouldplay a role. It is an assemblage of mostly identical neurons that looks like a potato-chip embedded in the brains of some animals, including humans. From it run connections to many important structures.
But the function of the claustrum remains a mystery. It might orchestrate the firing of neurons to flip the switch to consciousness. Then again, it might not. No one knows what it does.
Another possible candidate for the fabrication of consciousness is the micro-scaffolding, called microtubules, which support the internal structure of many kinds of cells. They permeate the interiors of soma cells and the root-like structures of brain neurons called dendrites.
NOTE from the EDITORS: This 13-minute video is a somewhat technical explanation of microtubules; interplay with neurons starts at 10:30.
Both Stuart Hameroff — an MD and emeritus professor for anesthesiology and psychology at the University of Arizona — and Nobel Prize winner Sir Roger Penrose — physicist, mathematician, and collaborator of the late Stephen Hawking — are promoting the notion that quantum properties of microtubules inside nerve cells of the brain and heart are the drivers for electrical dynamics of nervous-systems in people and other organisms.
These quantum level structures enable the simplest one-celled organisms — which lack neurons but are scaffolded by microtubules — to perform the neural functions of life.
Penrose and Hameroff are making a claim that the putative quantum behavior of microtubules, which are orders of magnitude smaller than neurons, might enable the subjective feeling of awareness and control that conscious life seems to share.
Some have argued like Schrödinger — see essay What is Life? — that some kind of structures (perhaps micro-tubules) might exist and function like quantum sensors to detect and interact with conjectured proto-consciousness, which is likely to be quantum in nature and foundational to a physical universe like ours.
The putative quantum nature of the brain is a reason why some theorists think entanglement and superposition explain much of the unusual behavior of conscious life.
Other scientists have stepped forward to label as absurd any notion that consciousness is quantum in nature or an intrinsic property of the universe; a few have ridiculed Dr. Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, for aiding and abetting what seems to them like quackery.
But not all.
Erwin Schrödinger believed consciousness was a fundamental property of the universe.
Consciousness is not, in contemporary consensus, a phenomenon that lies outside the brain (like light), which can be experienced by a life-form once it achieves a certain level of physical development.
Eyes, for example, evolve to detect a narrow band of electromagnetic radiation, which — though pervasive within the universe — is unknowable to life-forms who lack sense organs for vision.
The consensus of modern science seems to be that consciousness is not an intrinsic phenomenon of the universe that can be detected (or imbibed, to use a better word) by physical organisms after they attain a high level of biological complexity.
Most scientists would argue that a physical universe can teem with activity unobserved for billions of years. The universe may not exist for conscious life to observe until the universe creates it through an ageless process of evolution.
At the point when the universe manufactures conscious life, it acquires for itself a history and a definition determined by the life it brought forth, which now observes it. This idea seems reasonable until one understands that some of the most brilliant philosophers, many fluent in mathematics and sciences, disagree.
One popular opponent of this view is Australian David Chalmers who argues that consciousness is a fundamental requirement for a physical universe like our own; it predates life-forms such as humans.
Even a hard-headed scientist like Erwin Schrödinger, who gave the world the mathematics of the quantum wave function, imagined that quantum structures in the brain, should they exist, serve simply to connect (or entangle) the living to universal consciousness, which resides somewhere, somehow, outside brains, where it operates as the, perhaps, fundamental, intrinsic, and foundational property of the cosmos.
The smartest people who ever lived disagree about the nature of conscious life.
Why wouldn’t they?
None understand anything at all about what everyone calls the “hard problem.”
Matter and antimatter are in theory produced in a one-to-one ratio, which ought to ensure their mutual destruction. But if matter and antimatter emerge within spherical volumes, then their ratio must depend on the irrational number, π. The graininess of space determines to what decimal-place π rounds-off, which determines whether the ratio permits a little more or a little less matter than antimatter. In our universe the ratio may have gone positive and stayed that way for a long time. SOURCE: The Billy Lee Conjecture. To balance positive-matter and keep the universe in a zero-sum configuration, negative energies (like gravity) result, according to the late Stephen Hawking. Recall that energy and matter are equivalent per Einstein’s equation, . Energy and massless particles like photons of light are equivalent based on their frequencies; Einstein included this feature in his less familiar but expanded equation . These equivalencies are clues that might enable someone to properly explain how the universe works on large scales and small.
Virtual Particles
It might be worthwhile to pause a moment to examine another phenomenon about which physicists are in actual agreement. Taking a more wide-angled view of the universe should make conscious-life easier to think about and understand.
Because when anyone thinks about it — really thinks about it — what could be more unlikely than something dead — like a singularity that goes bang — bringing forth something that is not only alive but also conscious?
One popular explanation is that of science writer, Timothy Ferris, who wrote in a recent National Geographic article, ”Space looks empty when the fields languish near their minimum energy levels. But when the fields are excited, space comes alive with visible matter and energy.”
In other words, the apparent vacuum of space is an illusion that misleads observers about an underlying and hidden reality that includes pervasive fields of energy permeating all of space.
The positive and negative values of matter, energies, and forces of the entire universe sum to zero, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking wrote. But quantum uncertainties at every Planck-sized point in space oscillate about zero between positive and negative values. At this moment countless fluctuations across the vast expanse of space are skewing the balance — perhaps temporarily — into the structure of space and time, matter and forces, scientists observe.
My question is this: what is it that skews the balance of quantum fluctuations into a universe where humans can live in and observe? What brought the universe with its array of unlikely settings and its many arbitrary but exquisitely fine-tuned constants into the precise configuration required for the emergence of conscious life?
Stephen Hawking, former British Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge; born January 8, 1942; died March 14, 2018. The Editors
As Stephen Hawking made plain to non-scientists in his book, The Grand Design, there’s really nothing here. Not when it’s added up. The values of matter and energy add to zero. He speculated that the odds against a universe configured like ours could be as high as 10 followed by 500 zeros to one.
The number is so large that it might as well be infinity. It’s not possible for most people to say a number this big using only the words billion or trillion. They have to say a billion times a billion 56 times in a row without losing track — probably impossible. Or they could say a trillion times a trillion 42 times — not much easier.
It turns out that the only sure way to create a universe with conscious life by pure chance is to start with a multiverse populated by a number of universes equal to 10 followed by 400 zeroes multiplied by the entire number of protons and neutrons that exist in the one universe we know about — this one. Take a deep breath.
According to Stephen Hawking, developing a reasonable chance for a universe with human-like life might require a multi-verse containing a large number of other universes. Hawking estimated that it is equal to the number of protons and neutrons in our own universe multiplied by 10 followed by 400 zeroes. (As a practical matter, the number is equivalent to an infinity.) Some theorize that a multi-verse might resemble a vast ocean of foam with each bubble being a unique universe with its own fundamental constants, number of dimensions, and physical laws.
As mentioned before, everything observed in the universe seems to be the result of quantum uncertainties that hover around and sum to zero, both on small scales and large. Can uncertainties around a zero-sum reality give rise to consciousness?
Is it really uncountable trillions upon uncountable trillions of universes in an unimaginably large multi-verse that makes the existence of conscious human beings inevitable? Or is there some other mechanism which has drawn a single universe suitable for life out of the quantum fires of non-existence?
It’s a simple question. If the concept of a multi-verse turns out to be fantasy, then what is left? One solution to consider is that some form of conscious-life, fundamental and eternal, skewed the numbers and somehow imagined the universe into existence by a process that seems thus far unknowable.
What else could it be?
Think about it.
Without an unimaginably large number of universes, it’s not really possible for physical laws to configure themselves by chance into a universe with conscious life. It’s not realistic. Stephen Hawking said the odds are overwhelmingly against it; the chance might as well be zero, he said.
Take another breath.
EDITOR’S NOTE: July 4, 2019: Billy Lee published an essay today describing Roger Penrose’s conjecture about the origins of the Universe called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) or ”Eon Theory.” Recently launched satellites are gathering supporting evidence but the conjecture has not yet been embraced by mainstream cosmologists. Click the links to learn more.
Stephen Wolfram, British computer scientist and physicist, born August 29, 1959.
Stephen Wolfram in his book, A New Kind of Science, argues that a simple sequence of iterative quantum events which repeat and branch out according to a simple set of rules could, given enough time, generate a complex universe. Discovering what these simple rules might be has so far proved daunting. Presumably, the rules and events for such a sequence would have natural origins and create many universes out of the quantum uncertainties present in natural sets of initial boundary conditions.
Who knows?
One thing is certain. If it is ever proved that multi-verses are fantasy — if it is demonstrated that our universe is the only universe — then the argument for a conscious-life which has somehow imagined everything into existence is strengthened.
But it can’t be confirmed unless scientists establish that the so-called big bounce does not happen. If cosmologists show that the universe is in fact a one time non-repeatable event, then the case for a universe-generating conscious-life will be compelling if for no other reason than that the odds against a spontaneous one-time creation of a universe with unique and unlikely parameters are infinite.
Sean M. Carroll, Cosmologist, California Institute of Technology, born October 5, 1966.
One cosmologist who has gone on record against the possibility of a big-bounce scenario is Sean Carroll of Caltech. He has said that there is enough dark energy to drive an infinite expansion of our universe into a kind of entropic death.
His assertion, if proven true, seems to strengthen the argument for proto-conscious-life except that he also said that the whole of reality is probably a multi-verse populated by the births of trillions upon trillions of Big Bang events — which weakens the argument.
It seems that a definitive answer to the question of whether we live in a multi-verse (or not) might be a key indicator for or against the presence of a fundamental and foundational consciousness in nature.
Paul J. Steinhardt of Princeton University; born December 25, 1952.
In 2013 a new theory was proposed that argues against a multiverse. It was proposed by Paul Steinhardt, the Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University. His team’s idea is based on data gathered by the state-of-the-art Planck Satellite launched in 2003 to map the infrared cosmic background radiation.
The theory is ekpyrotic, or cyclic, and asserts that the universe beats like a heart, expanding and contracting in cycles with each cycle lasting perhaps a trillion years and repeating on and on forever.
Steinhardt was once a major advocate for the Big Bang theory and the mechanism of cosmic inflation. He had been a prominent proponent of the inevitable multi-verse that most versions of the Big Bang theory permit. He is now proposing an alternative scenario.
His latest theory has the advantage that it makes certain predictions that can be tested — unlike the mechanism of inflation required by the Big Bang theory, which can’t. In his new theory, every bounce of the universe resembles every other bounce and presumably generates similar constants, laws, and physics. If conscious-life is rare, most bounces will spawn a sterile universe.
If the idea is right, fine tuning of our universe would have to be the natural result of some underlying feature of reality not yet understood. In this model, consciousness can emerge, certainly, but is not necessarily fundamental, causative, shared, or even inevitable.
To my mind, this is the model of the universe that is the most compelling, the most incomprehensible, the most mind-blowing. Unlike all other theories, this one suggests that the universe might have no beginning and no end. It doesn’t change. It’s eternal. It beats with a familiar rhythm, the rhythm of our hearts, and it will never stop.
What is frustrating to me is that the ekpyrotic model doesn’t add insight into the question about conscious-life posed by my essay: Is consciousness a fundamental and necessary feature of physical reality?
Or is conscious life a rare accident that occurs inside a long path of infinite oscillations in a universe whose reason for being humans will never understand?
Editor’s Note:As of July 2017, studies of the cosmic background radiation have not revealed with high enough statistical precision the presence of primordial B-mode gravity waves — a discovery which, if confirmed statistically by high sigma, would undermine the ekpyrotic theory. Refinement of the search and examination of data continues. Right now, the ekpyrotic theory is hanging by a statistical thread.
Editor’s Note July 4, 2019: Another theory gathering supportive evidence is the Conformal Cyclic Cosmology model (CCC) proposed by Roger Penrose. Click the link to learn more.
I want to veer back to the previous discussion about matter and antimatter for a moment. It seems that each precipitates equally out of the energy enriched dimensional fields of spacetime so that in a smooth, un-pixilated universe matter and antimatter should self-annihilate and sum to zero. (Refer to the Billy Lee Conjecture in a prior illustration.)
A universe whose space is smooth and continuous will not self-generate anything at all from such a process. It is the geometry of a spherical bubble within a pixilated space-time fabric that forces surplus in the production of either matter or antimatter.
The choice between the two is completely determined by the size of the pixels that make up the fabric of spacetime because pixilation of spacetime forces the normally irrational ratio of the surface area of a sphere to its diameter to collapse to a rational number, which necessarily warps the symmetry of the sphere. If matter is generated inside multi-dimensional bubbles, any reduction to rationality that compels symmetries to fail will force an excessive production of one of the two possible states of matter. It can’t be any other way.
Some physicists believe matter (and its equivalent, energy) is pixilated at the scale of the Planck constant, at least in this universe. Experiments are underway to find out if this idea is true. For now, scientists observe mathematical evidence for mysterious particles coming into and out of existence everywhere all the time. And it is matter particles which seem to completely dominate anti-matter.
To counterbalance this preponderance of positive matter, negative energy must emerge, which scientists like Isaac Newton called gravity.
Einstein showed that matter and energy are equivalent; they are two sides of the same coin. He treated gravitational energy as a deformation by mass in a mathematical fabric he referred to as spacetime. Massless phenomenon like photons of light held energy by means of their electro-magnetic field frequencies.
No one understands why quantum fluctuations occur. Some think it’s an illusion driven by the mathematics of quantum mechanics. Others think it’s real.
We know that this phenomenon of spontaneous creation of positive matter (or frequency) and negative energy is occurring, because conscious minds (scientists) observe its effects in their laboratories. No one understands the mechanism of quantum fluctuations enough to rule out the possibility, it seems to me, that our own minds — in collusion with the instruments we have invented and built — somehow create the impression — a kind of illusion, really — of phenomena that can occur only in the presence of a conscious mind.
Is it possible, for example, that inside the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), scientists are creating the particles they want to see in order to confirm their parochial notions of the universe? They sometimes seem to be using their conscious minds and the machines they have designed to fabricate new worlds so remote and so tiny that they will never be observed, not by any human, not even by themselves, except in their imaginations as they read through publications of the results of their experiments in science journals.
Atlas ”particle” detector at CERN. Notice tiny human worker at lower center for scale.
Are theses scientists creating particles in worlds that lie deep within the subterranean matrix of exotic materials and forces they have built and modeled within their labyrinth of super-computers — which exist only in their imaginations, but which they are able to confirm by employing thousands of researchers around the world to pour over hundreds-of-thousands of pages of machine and sensor-generated gibberish, from which they glean the unlikely patterns they marvel-over in their peer-reviewed scientific publications?
Are these human beings, these scientists, in the first stages of using pure consciousness to create universes — albeit tiny ones — in the mammoth laboratories of CERN?
Maybe not. It seems preposterous. But it is a conspiratorial perspective I couldn’t resist including in my essay. Sorry.
Sean Carroll, in his book about CERN, The Particle at the End of the Universe, describes in chapter-six subsections — Information Overload and Sharing Data — that the data-handling and sampling processes used at CERN could enable just such self-fulfilling validations to occur absent careful and conscientious oversight.
There may be another reason why experiments always seem to confirm the Standard Model of quantum physics and never contradict it. A strange symbiosis between the standard model of sub-atomic reality — as measured by synchrotrons, accelerators, colliders, etc. — and mathematics may actually exist in nature.
If true, no one need despair that gathering resources to build larger colliders and other instruments is not practical. Theoretical physicists can simply do math to discover new truths. They can trust — should an experiment ever be completed in some unimaginably resource-rich future — that their math-based conjectures will be confirmed in the same way as was the Higgs boson.
Nima Arkani-Hamed, American theoretical physicist; born April 5, 1972.
Absent larger colliders, the path forward, according to theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, is to keep the work of discovery inside the experimental constraints imposed by the knowledge already gathered, as theoreticians labor to develop new theories.
These constraints are already so restrictive and so reduce the number of paths to truth that it’s possible someone might find a route to understanding which is unique, sufficient and exclusive. If so, theorists could have confidence in the new theories though experimental verification might lie beyond any foreseeable technology of the future.
Anyway, the universe shouldn’t exist, it seems, except that people can imagine — under the influence of the uncertainty in the remote decimal place described earlier — that tiny differences in the ratio of matter to antimatter which emerged in the ancient past created an imbalance — temporarily, perhaps, but continuing for billions of years — which piled up to become enormous. As matter continued to pile up, so did the negative forces like gravity, which counterbalanced it.
One day, gravity (and perhaps other forces like the mysterious and long sought-for dark energy) might pull all the positive matter back into a little pile; pull it back behind the event-horizon of what Stephen Hawking calls a black-hole; pull it back into the unfathomable uncertainties of a blinking and unstable quantum singularity aching to explode.
Explode into what? Perhaps the next quantum eruption will spiral out into a new and completely strange universe of different-valued fundamental constants and a bizarre number of dimensions — a universe almost certainly unsuitable, this time around, for life.
Is it possible that such a process — driven by tiny uncertainties (or tolerances) in the natural quantum ratio of matter to antimatter within a rare configuration of fundamental constants and numbers of dimensions — could give rise to not just any universe but to one with an emergent conscious life as well?
Stephen Hawking has speculated that it can, but cautions that the odds against life are huge. He has speculated that an infinite number of universes — a multi-verse — is required to get a reasonable chance that a universe as unique and unusual as ours will appear.
Some believe the large scale structure of the universe resembles a collection of neurons, much like a human brain.
Modern science agrees with Hawking and has decided that this universe — the one we live in now — is probably only one of an infinite number of universes that make a multiverse. Our unique and unusual universe has, over billions of years, fabricated a transient conscious life which is, at this very moment, observing it.
A fleeting conscious life is discovering that the universe hovers in a state which from a matter/antimatter perspective could — if a preponderance of antimatter were produced (perhaps in an adjacent universe, if not this one — sum to zero someday like a popping soap bubble and cease to exist. When the observing conscious life is extinguished during this possible zero-sum resolution in the distant future, the result will be no universe, no life, no memory, nothing.
In any event, if antimatter doesn’t annihilate the universe, entropy might. (Entropy is the natural process of heat death, where all motion and information decay to zero over time.) Under this scenario, when the end comes, in the far distant future, it will be said (were there anyone around who could say it): the universe never happened. It will become a vanishing blip on the screen of reality, because no one will remain to remember it.
Then again, the negative forces of gravity and dark energy might restore the zero balance required by quantum non-existence to pull together all positive matter into an uncertain quantum singularity called the Big Crunch. A new universe with new parameters and constants might then emerge after the singularity undergoes a quantum fluctuation.
Maybe the universe cycles endlessly, contracting and expanding like a beating heart, which some have characterized as aBig Bounce. During some expansions conscious-life emerges; in most others, though, it does not.
Another theory of a possible catastrophic scenario has recently emerged after scientists determined the mass of the Higgs ”particle” at CERN in March, 2013. It turns out its value might permit the Higgs field to someday (no one knows when) undergo a spontaneous phase transition.
A phase transition would change the value of many of the fine-tuned constants and forces that shape the chemistry and biology of the cosmos. A phase transition in the Higgs field would certainly be catastrophic for life. It would be as if the universe was a block of ice for billions of years and in one short spasm turned to steam.
In any event, a Higgs field phase-transition would obliterate all knowledge of the universe. All history of the existence of a missing universe from the recent (or ancient) past would be lost — unable to be reconstructed, detected or proved. The universe didn’t exist; it never existed. In fact, it could not have existed.
One dynamic that no one talks about is a mass of parallel universes stacked like pancakes on all sides of our own. The mass that lies outside our own universe might be dense enough to transmit a gravitational tug that is pulling our universe apart like an expanding soap bubble in a field of foam.
This external mass might drive an expansion that provides the energy that forces galaxies to rotate at their far reaches faster than physicists think they should. Mass outside our universe could transform the metrics of our own space-time to initiate someday the phase transformation in the Higgs field that would follow a runaway expansion — an expansion that ends in nothingness, like a soap bubble popping on a grand scale.
The consequence of zero-sum, under which matter and antimatter, like popping soap bubbles, add to nothing;
or entropy, where all the material and information in the universe decline and decay by cooling and freezing to a motionless absolute zero;
or the big crunch, where negative forces pull positive matter into a quantum singularity which fluctuates into one of an almost infinite number of new realities;
or an endlessly repeating big bounce, where the universe contracts and expands like a beating heart that is driven by a set of fundamental constants that never really change — though the history of every bounce is erased by the bounce that follows;
or an inevitable phase transition in the Higgs field which vaporizes the cosmos into a state of virtual non-existence…
…means, logically, and in the perfect hindsight of an imaginary observer billions (or, perhaps, trillions) of years from now, that the probability there ever was a universe of matter populated by conscious-life might actually be zero.
A long time from now, the universe may disappear, either from the natural process of entropy, or an increase in the generation of antimatter, or both. Then again, it could morph into something unrecognizable and hostile to life through the mechanism of the Big Crunch. It might endlessly regenerate copies of itself through a cycle called the BigBounce where conscious-life almost never develops. Another possibility: a spontaneous Higgs Field phase transition, which vaporizes the universe where we live, perhaps driven by forces that live outside in a field of universes we will never see.
Yes, scientists say, under every scenario they can imagine, the universe in which humans now live will cease to exist. Conscious-life will disappear. No one will be left to argue about it. All the evidence will point to a universe that never happened.
Of course, no one will hear the evidence. In the universe that doesn’t exist, and even in an existing universe where conscious-life cannot or does not emerge, there is no reality, there is no evidence, no information, no history.
EDITORS NOTE: July 4, 2019:Based on the recent theory by Roger Penrose it may not necessarily be science-fiction to imagine that intelligent life might communicate across successive universes using the cosmic background radiation as a kind of writing tablet. As crazy as the idea sounds, evidence gathered by recent satellites is making a statistical case for Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.
These views, as I understand them, reflect the most popular ideas in modern science about the universe and conscious-life. They make sense. But these views reek with futility and despair. And, despite sensibility, they fail to answer a basic question: how can this be?
This graphic shows what scientists think happened, not why or how.
How is it that random fluctuations in the aether (for lack of a better term) generated something on the scale and immensity of a universe; perhaps an infinity of universes; and gave birth to conscious life?
The mere existence of a universe (and its conscious life) emanating from uncertain and random fluctuations in the vast nothingness of nothing seems ludicrous on its face. We can’t make sense of it; not in any way that permits us to exhale, throw out our arms and say, ahhhh… so that’s how it works.
We are missing a piece of the puzzle. It seems that modern science has led us into a tunnel that has no light at its end.
Like the radiation that stimulates our brains to create the brilliant colors we see inside our heads, consciousness may pour into us from out there.
What is anyone to make of all this? On the one hand, there is a consensus among contemporary scientists who believe consciousness results from the way brains are hard-wired. Throw in enough parallel electrical circuits to reach a threshold, add in sufficient hormonal feedback loops, and, voila! — consciousness. One problem, though: no one has done it; not yet.
On the other hand, we hear the echoes of the voice of one of the fathers of quantum physics, Erwin Schrödinger, calling from the shadows of recent history. He says, No! Brains are detectors, imbibers, of a consciousness that lives outside ourselves and is, in fact, a fundamental and foundational feature of reality. Like the mysterious electromagnetic radiation that pours into our skulls to excite our brains into conjuring up the brilliant colors we see inside our heads, consciousness pours into us from out there.
Like the unseen and as yet undiscovered dark matter and dark energy that many scientists believe together shape the universe and drive its expansion, consciousness remains elusive of attempts to discover it. Perhaps scientists aren’t looking hard enough or in the right places.
Then again, maybe dark matter doesn’t exist and will never be found, if alternative theories like MoND (modified Newtonian dynamics) prove true. It might be that the shape of galaxies and the accelerating expansion of space are instead the evidence of parallel universes that stack like pancakes against our own universe to add the elusive gravitational forces necessary to both constrain the galaxies and drive the expansion of space. Who knows?
It might be that MoND and the gravitational tug of parallel universes work together to produce the odd cosmology astronomers are observing with today’s modern space sensors. Constructing a successful model of the universe which incorporates the reasonable conjectures of MoND might depend on a collaborative summation of forces that occur both inside and outside of our own universe.
What the universe is and how it really works is not yet understood by the scientists who line up for funding before governments and universities; not even close.
What if life-forms are connected in some way to a Conscious-Life who brought the physical universe into existence?
In any event, under the stimulation of consciousness, all seem to know on some level deep inside that they are alive and aware and connected, somehow. They feel a certain common awe when they look up into the night sky and see the universe that birthed them; folks seem to sense a Conscious-Life who stands behind it all; who knows and cares about them; who shares with them the glorious experience of the universe. It’s the religious experience that every culture on the earth has in common.
What if this experience is real? What if we are connected in some way to a fundamental and eternal Conscious-Life who brought the physical universe we know into existence, perhaps through pure thought like we imagined earlier the scientists at CERN might be learning to do?
Is this a question worth exploring?
Does consciousness come first or last?
Is an answer within our grasp that will satisfy our yearning for truth and certainty? Or is it a dispute that will never be settled?
Tobias Dantzig, the Latvian author of Number (one ofAlbert Einstein’s favorite books), once claimed, …from the standpoint of logic either hypothesis is tenable, and from the standpoint of experience neither is demonstrable.
Can he be right? Will the arguments between hard-headed scientists and stubborn philosophers last forever?
I don’t think so. Scoffers may say no, the dispute is already settled. Schrödinger was wrong. And if he wasn’t wrong, could anyone detect the difference? Does it matter at all if consciousness lives inside our heads, or if brains draw consciousness from the universe outside?
I believe the issue can be settled. And it is important. The stakes for humans are enormous. In religion, philosophy, politics, and government what people do, the way they live, their planning for the future; the ways they choose to live out their lives and organize their societies, humans seem to be grounding every decision, every action, every moral choice they make on an assumption that each person creates inside themselves a unique view of reality, which will die when they do.
But what if they are wrong?
What if we learned that consciousness doesn’t die?
What if we learned that, though our bodies may someday die, consciousness never dies; the feature of our existence which imparted the sensation of awareness was something our bodies fed on during their brief lives to give them meaning?
What if our kids and grandkids, our friends and neighbors, even our enemies, and all those that came before us and will someday come after us imbibe alike from this same life-enhancing pool of awareness?
What if all life-forms, sufficiently developed, drink from an ocean of Conscious-Life everywhere in the universe?
What if we learn it isn’t our bodies that make us feel alive?
It is instead a fundamental and basic feature of the universe, a sea of consciousness from which we all drink while our bodies live.
What are the consequences should we learn that, though our bodies and brains may decay to dust,the awareness that makes us feel alive never does?
What if we learn we are conscious-life and always will be?
Billy Lee
Addendum by the Editorial Board, 16 September 2018: Michael Egnor is not a public person; his biography on Wikipedia is hopelessly incomplete. Nevertheless, he has performed a number of neurosurgeries, apparently, where outcomes ran counter to popular theories about how the brain and consciousness work.
On September 14 Michael Egnor published in Christianity Today a non-scientific article where he wrote about his clinical experience. Billy Lee strongly argued against publishing a link to his article, but The Editorial Board, unanimously overruled.
Seen through the prism of Billy Lee’s essay, we agree that the article contains clues that readers might find helpful despite the surgeon’s biases — one or two of which Billy Lee might characterize as kind of silly. Here is the link: More Than Material Minds. The Editors
Sensing involves seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting, right? It’s the traditional five senses that most folks learned about in elementary school a long time ago.
Scientists added complexity to the number and capabilities of the senses in modern times to include “modalities” like sense of place, pain, balance, temperature, vibration, and awareness of chemical concentrations — like salt and carbon dioxide— inside the body.
All this complexity pushes readers into deep weeds, which I am going to avoid in this essay. It will work just as well not to needlessly bewilder people.
Never mind that certain life forms like birds can sense the earth’s magnetic field, or that sharks can sense the electrical activity in living prey. Many ways of sensing the universe are possible. This essay deals with those most familiar to humans.
Until humans developed the technologies of modern science, sensing (and making sense of what was sensed through the mental process of reasoning) was how people formed ideas about what the universe is. But there was a big problem.
Senses told us the sun looked yellow, thunder sounded loud, rocks felt hard, roses smelled sweet, and almonds tasted bitter.
The problem should now be obvious.
These qualities don’t exist in the universe. They are hallucinations of brains created when organs like the eye, ear, skin, nose, and tongue interact with elements of the universe which, in themselves, share none of these qualities.
Qualities like these don’t exist in the physical universe. They are hallucinations of living brains.
These hallucinations are inaccessible to all but the living organism who experiences them. They are unique and not detectable by others, in this sense: people can ask others if they see the same yellow color they see. When they say yes, they can decide to take them at their word, or not.
It is not possible to prove that they are telling the truth. In fact it’s not possible for anyone to answer truthfully, because no one can know how anyone but themself experiences the color yellow.
The interaction of sense organs, like eyes, with electromagnetic radiation is selective. Only a limited range of frequencies will stimulate the retina of the eye, for example, to emit the necessary electric and chemical messaging the brain uses to construct the hallucination called vision.
Some of the radiation falling into the eye does not interact with any sensing organ and remains undetected. In fact, the human eye can detect only wavelengths of light between 15 and 35 millionths of an inch long (400 to 900 nanometers).
Note to the non-technical :A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, which is written as a decimal point followed by eight zeroes and a one — i.e. .000000001. In engineering shorthand it’s written as 1E-9 meters. Humans see wavelengths of light that are 400 to 900 times longer. Scientists and engineers usually work in meters, not inches. The Editorial Board.
This narrow range is transformed by structures in the retina into messaging the brain can use. Wavelengths up to a thousand times longer (one thirty-second of an inch) are able to be felt as heat.
To the rest of the light spectrum, humans are completely blind. This spectrum includes light with wavelengths as long as sixty miles (called radio waves) down to wavelengths of light called gamma rays, which are many millions of times smaller than the wavelength of violet, the shortest wavelength human eyes can detect.
One reason people (and other life) see and feel a limited range of frequencies is because the energy of the sun that is able to penetrate Earth’s atmosphere to reach its surface lies in this limited band. The rest is blocked.
Of the sun’s energy that is able to reach Earth’s surface, 43% is in the narrow visible spectrum people can see. 49% is in the form of heat, which can be felt. Ultra-violet light — which some insects see — makes up 7%. Life on Earth evolved to sense light at wavelengths able to reach its surface.
The other parts of the light spectrum — like X-ray and gamma light — are deflected or absorbed by the nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere. Only 1% of the sun’s energy that manages to reach Earth’s surface lies in these high frequency bands.
A great deal of the light that reaches Earth from outside the solar system falls into the range of low-energy radio frequencies to which all Earth-life is completely blind. Radio-frequency light-waves are long and fuzzy. The sun produces mostly higher frequency light. Radio-waves seem to be unnecessary to the survival of life on Earth.
An ability to sense radio waves makes no impact on living things; it provides no survival advantages. Yes, on Earth intelligent life-forms (i.e. humans) have learned to amplify and convert radio light into sound to communicate and entertain themselves over large distances.
Scientists continue to search for evidence that far away life, should it exist, might share the same aptitude for communication. So far, the search has found nothing — no evidence for any kind of life whatever.
The image of light formed by the mind is fantastic — which means it is useful to the organism that sees the image, but the image doesn’t contain many (or any) clues about the external physical phenomenon that triggered its creation.
There is nothing even remotely similar between the color yellow (or any other color) and the electromagnetic radiation that oscillates trillions of times per second to ignite the mechanisms of vision.
There is nothing even remotely similar between the color yellow (or any other color) and electromagnetic radiation oscillating trillions of times per second.
The hard solid feeling of rock has nothing in common with the silicon atoms from which rock is made and whose nuclei are separated from one another by spaces many thousands of times their size. Nor does it have anything in common with the hundreds of different molecules which make up the nearby skin and nerve cells — themselves many millions of times larger than silicon atoms and separated from them by large distances.
The feeling of hard solid and the color yellow exist in my mind. I am sure of it. But can I find, for example, the color yellow in your mind?
The answer is no. A brain surgeon might probe a part of someone’s brain, and they report seeing yellow. But if she examines the area of the probe, she has no chance of discovering the color yellow. She will never find it.
My experience with the color yellow is subjective. If you tell me you also experience yellow, I believe you, because you are like me, and it seems reasonable that we will experience things in the same way.
But if you were asked to prove you see yellow the way I see it, you couldn’t do it.
Not only colors, but sounds, feelings, smells and tastes will vanish without a trace once life is gone. So again, the question: What, exactly, is the Universe?
If life disappears from the universe it will take the color yellow with it. Only the electromagnetic radiation that triggered the hallucination of the color yellow will remain.
Since the radiation can no longer be detected, seen, or experienced by any conscious observer, what is it exactly? Not only colors, but sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes will vanish without a trace once life is gone.
So again, I ask: What exactly is the universe?
Gas Sensor
Let’s “look” at scientific inquiry for the answer. What does science do? Science examines the universe quantitatively and avoids the qualitative and subjective attributes the senses provide. Or it at least tries to.
Science designs detectors to find as much discoverable phenomenon as it can — phenomenon human biological senses can’t discern or aren’t sensitive enough to experience.
But someone has to ask: Aren’t these detectors nothing more than enhanced sensors augmented by gauges and dials to increase the precision of measurement? And don’t living, conscious human-beings use their senses and their brains to make sense of the information the detectors provide? What has anyone gained by science?
The scientist’s tool of choice is mathematics, because it dramatically reduces the fuzziness — the subjectivity — of the senses, and replaces qualities like the color yellow and the feeling hard solid with measurables like oscillations per second and pounds per square inch; that is, with attributes that can be measured by all observers and which, presumably, exist independently of a conscious mind.
Mathematics uses logic and simplified representations of objects and forces to create symbolic models. Certain operations can be performed on these models to reveal non-intuitive relationships among the simplified variables.
Ok… again, have we gained anything? Or does mathematics force a sacrifice of information and detail to simplify understanding? Are we closer to knowing what the universe is, or farther away? Can the best sensors and the most sophisticated mathematics really get humans closer to understanding what the universe is?
One surprise that mathematics has revealed: telescopes and other sensors show that too much gravity is at work in the universe for the amount of matter and energy scientists see. 85% of the matter that must be out there can’t be seen.
More shocking: 95% of the energy and matter that the theory of gravity says must be out there, no one has ever observed. Physicists don’t know what this invisible matter and energy is, or even where it is — though some scientists believe it is evenly distributed throughout the cosmos. They call it dark matter and dark energy.
I don’t want to scare anyone, but the universe is mysterious, and no one understands it. Two questions I’m grappling with:
2 – Is Consciousness powerless to interact with the universe in ways that change it?
Consciousness may exist independently of any individual conscious-being.
These are serious questions.
If the answers to these questions are yes, then consciousness is not necessary for the universe to exist, and the understanding of what the universe really is will probably never be complete — certainly not for humans. Consciousness is something that evolved over billions of years and will someday be missing once again.
The universe won’t notice or care. Conscious life — like humans — can think about the universe all they want. They will never change it. This is the current popular view, is it not?
But the answers to these questions could be no. And it might be possible to prove it.
Consciousness might be something human beings plug into and even share.
If the answers turn out to be no, the implications are profound.
No means the physical universe may have evolved from consciousness, not the other way around.
No means conscious humans may have the ability to completely understand the universe and make sense of it someday.
No means that consciousness may exist independently of any individual conscious-being.
No might mean consciousness is something human beings plug into and even share.
No might mean God exists, and — though our bodies die — we never will.
, right? Get out the calculator, those who don’t believe it. Reversing the digits to make 8402 does not result in an exact number that can be raised by the power of 5 to produce 8402. 
plus a lot more decimals. 6.09363… is not a whole (or exact) number. 
. Energy and massless particles like photons of light are equivalent based on their frequencies; Einstein included this feature in his less familiar but expanded equation 
. These equivalencies are clues that might enable someone to properly explain how the universe works on large scales and small. 
