Summary: Using neuroimaging, researchers identified a brain network crucial to human consciousness. Using advanced multimodal MRI techniques, the team mapped connections among the brainstem, thalamus, and cortex, forming what they call the “default ascending arousal network,” which is vital for sustaining wakefulness.
Their research not only enhances our understanding of consciousness but also aims to improve clinical outcomes for patients with severe brain injuries by providing new insights for targeted treatments. The findings could revolutionize approaches to various consciousness-related neurological disorders and have already spurred clinical trials aimed at reactivating consciousness in coma patients
Key Facts:
Advanced Imaging Techniques: The study utilized high-resolution multimodal MRI scans to visualize and map critical brain pathways at submillimeter spatial resolution, revealing connections that sustain human wakefulness.
Functional Integration: Researchers linked the subcortical arousal network with the cortical default mode network, providing a comprehensive map of the networks involved in maintaining consciousness even during rest.
Clinical Applications: The insights gained from this study are being applied in clinical trials, aiming to stimulate specific brain areas to help coma patients recover consciousness, showcasing the study’s direct impact on treatment strategies.
Source: Mass General
In a paper titled, “Multimodal MRI reveals brainstem connections that sustain wakefulness in human consciousness,” published today in Science Translational Medicine, a group of researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, and Boston Children’s Hospital, created a connectivity map of a brain network that they propose is critical to human consciousness
The study involved high-resolution scans that enabled the researchers to visualize brain connections at submillimeter spatial resolution. This technical advance allowed them to identify previously unseen pathways connecting the brainstem, thalamus, hypothalamus, basal forebrain, and cerebral cortex.
Together, these pathways form a “default ascending arousal network” that sustains wakefulness in the resting, conscious human brain. The concept of a “default” network is based on the idea that specific networks within the brain are most functionally active when the brain is in a resting state of consciousness. In contrast, other networks are more active when the brain is performing goal-directed tasks.
To investigate the functional properties of this default brain network, the researchers analyzed 7 Tesla resting-state functional MRI data from the Human Connectome Project.
These analyses revealed functional connections between the subcortical default ascending arousal network and the cortical default mode network that contributes to self-awareness in the resting, conscious brain.
The complementary structural and functional connectivity maps provide a neuroanatomic basis for integrating arousal and awareness in human consciousness. The researchers released the MRI data, brain mapping methods, and a new Harvard Ascending Arousal Network Atlas, to support future efforts to map the connectivity of human consciousness
“Our goal was to map a human brain network that is critical to consciousness and to provide clinicians with better tools to detect, predict, and promote recovery of consciousness in patients with severe brain injuries,” explains lead-author Brian Edlow, MD, co-director of Mass General Neuroscience, associate director of the Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery (CNTR) at Mass General, an associate professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and a Chen Institute MGH Research Scholar 2023-2028.
Dr. Edlow explains, “Our connectivity results suggest that stimulation of the ventral tegmental area’s dopaminergic pathways has the potential to help patients recover from coma because this hub node is connected to many regions of the brain that are critical to consciousness.”
Senior author Hannah Kinney, MD, Professor Emerita at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, adds that “the human brain connections that we identified can be used as a roadmap to better understand a broad range of neurological disorders associated with altered consciousness, from coma, to seizures, to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).”
The authors are currently conducting clinical trials to stimulate the default ascending arousal network in patients with coma after traumatic brain injury, with the goal of reactivating the network and restoring consciousness
A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish and other overlooked animals experience consciousness.
Introduction
In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Given small wooden balls, the bees pushed them around and rotated them. The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded by the scientists. It was, apparently, just for fun.
The study on playful bees is part of a body of research that a group of prominent scholars of animal minds cited today, buttressing a new declaration that extends scientific support for consciousness to a wider suite of animals than has been formally acknowledged before. For decades, there’s been a broad agreement among scientists that animals similar to us — the great apes, for example — have conscious experience, even if their consciousness differs from our own. In recent years, however, researchers have begun to acknowledge that consciousness may also be widespread among animals that are very different from us, including invertebrates with completely different and far simpler nervous systems.
The new declaration, signed by biologists and philosophers, formally embraces that view. It reads, in part: “The empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including all reptiles, amphibians and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans and insects).” Inspired by recent research findings that describe complex cognitive behaviors in these and other animals, the document represents a new consensus and suggests that researchers may have overestimated the degree of neural complexity required for consciousness.
The four-paragraph New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness was unveiled today, April 19, at a one-day conference called “The Emerging Science of Animal Consciousness” being held at New York University. Spearheaded by the philosopher and cognitive scientist Kristin Andrews of York University in Ontario, the philosopher and environmental scientist Jeff Sebo of New York University, and the philosopher Jonathan Birch of the London School of Economics and Political Science, the declaration has so far been signed by 39 researchers, including the psychologists Nicola Clayton and Irene Pepperberg, the neuroscientists Anil Seth and Christof Koch, the zoologist Lars Chittka, and the philosophers David Chalmers and Peter Godfrey-Smith.
We have much more in common with other animals than we do with things like ChatGPT.
Anil Seth, University of Sussex
The declaration focuses on the most basic kind of consciousness, known as phenomenal consciousness. Roughly put, if a creature has phenomenal consciousness, then it is “like something” to be that creature — an idea enunciated by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his influential 1974 essay, “What is it like to be a bat?” Even if a creature is very different from us, Nagel wrote, “fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism. … We may call this the subjective character of experience.” If a creature is phenomenally conscious, it has the capacity to experience feelings such as pain or pleasure or hunger, but not necessarily more complex mental states such as self-awareness.
“I hope the declaration [draws] greater attention to the issues of nonhuman consciousness, and to the ethical challenges that accompany the possibility of conscious experiences far beyond the human,” wrote Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, in an email. “I hope it sparks discussion, informs policy and practice in animal welfare, and galvanizes an understanding and appreciation that we have much more in common with other animals than we do with things like ChatGPT.”
These and other signs of conscious states in animals that had long been considered less than conscious excited and challenged biologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind. “A lot of people have now accepted for a while that, for example, mammals and birds are either conscious or very likely to be conscious, but less attention has been paid to other vertebrate and especially invertebrate taxa,” Sebo said. In conversations and at meetings, experts largely agreed that these animals must have consciousness. However, this newly formed consensus wasn’t being communicated to the wider public, including other scientists and policymakers. So the three researchers decided to draft a clear, concise statement and circulate it among their colleagues for endorsement. The declaration is not meant to be comprehensive but rather “to point to where we think the field is now and where the field is headed,” Sebo said.
The new declaration updates the most recent effort to establish scientific consensus on animal consciousness. In 2012, researchers published the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which said that an array of nonhuman animals, including but not limited to mammals and birds, have “the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors” and that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.”
[Octopuses have] got this attentive engagement with things, with us and with novel objects that makes it very hard not to think that there’s quite a lot going on inside them.
Peter Godfrey-Smith, University of Sydney
The new declaration expands the scope of its predecessor and is also worded more carefully, Seth wrote. “It doesn’t try to do science by diktat, but rather emphasizes what we should take seriously regarding animal consciousness and the relevant ethics given the evidence and theories that we have.” He wrote that he is “not in favor of avalanches of open letters and the like,” but that he ultimately “came to the conclusion that this declaration was very much worth supporting.”
Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher of science at the University of Sydney who has worked extensively with octopuses, believes that the complex behaviors those creatures exhibit — including problem-solving, tool use and play behavior — can only be interpreted as indicators of consciousness. “They’ve got this attentive engagement with things, with us and with novel objects that makes it very hard not to think that there’s quite a lot going on inside them,” he said. He noted that recent papers looking at pain and dreamlike states in octopuses and cuttlefish “point in the same direction … toward experience as being a real part of their lives.”
While many of the animals mentioned in the declaration have brains and nervous systems that are very different from those of humans, the researchers say that this needn’t be a barrier to consciousness. For example, a bee’s brain contains only about a million neurons, compared to some 86 billion in the case of humans. But each of those bee neurons may be as structurally complex as an oak tree. The network of connections they form is also incredibly dense, with each neuron contacting perhaps 10,000 or 100,000 others. The nervous system of an octopus, by contrast, is complex in other ways. Its organization is highly distributed rather than centralized; a severed arm can exhibit many of the behaviors of the intact animal.
Recent research on animal minds — including those of crayfish, octopuses, snakes and fish — suggests that consciousness “can exist in a [neural] architecture that looks completely alien” to ours,
Introduction
The upshot, Andrews said, is that “we might not need nearly as much equipment as we thought we did” to achieve consciousness. She noted, for example, that even a cerebral cortex — the outer layer of the mammalian brain, which is believed to play a role in attention, perception, memory and other key aspects of consciousness — may not be necessary for the simpler phenomenal consciousness targeted in the declaration.
“There was a big debate about whether fish are conscious, and a lot of that had to do with them lacking the brain structures that we see in mammals,” she said. “But when you look at birds and reptiles and amphibians, they have very different brain structures and different evolutionary pressures — and yet some of those brain structures, we’re finding, are doing the same kind of work that a cerebral cortex does in humans.”
Godfrey-Smith agreed, noting that behaviors indicative of consciousness “can exist in an architecture that looks completely alien to vertebrate or human architecture.”
Mindful Relations
While the declaration has implications for the treatment of animals, and especially for the prevention of animal suffering, Sebo noted that the focus should go beyond pain. It’s not enough for people to prevent animals in captivity from experiencing bodily pain and discomfort, he said. “We also have to provide them with the kinds of enrichment and opportunities that allow them to express their instincts and explore their environments and engage in social systems and otherwise be the kinds of complex agents they are.”
But the consequences of bestowing the label of “conscious” onto a wider array of animals — particularly animals whose interests we are not used to considering — are not straightforward. For example, our relationship with insects may be “inevitably a somewhat antagonistic one,” Godfrey-Smith said. Some pests eat crops, and mosquitoes can carry diseases. “The idea that we could just sort of make peace with the mosquitoes — it’s a very different thought than the idea that we could make peace with fish and octopuses,” he said.
Similarly, little attention is given to the well-being of insects such as Drosophila, which are widely used in biology research. “We think about the welfare of livestock and of mice in research, but we never think about the welfare of the insects,” said Matilda Gibbons, who researches the neural basis of consciousness at the University of Pennsylvania and has signed the declaration
While scientific bodies have created some standards for the treatment of lab mice, it’s not clear if today’s declaration will lead to new standards for the treatment of insects. But new scientific findings do sometimes spark new policies. Britain, for example, enacted legislation to increase protection for octopuses, crabs and lobsters after a London School of Economics report indicated that those animals can experience pain, distress or harm.
While the declaration makes no mention of artificial intelligence, the issue of possible AI consciousness has been on the minds of animal-consciousness researchers. “Current AI systems are very unlikely to be conscious,” Sebo said. However, what he’s learned about animal minds “does give me pause and makes me want to approach the topic with caution and humility.”
Andrews hopes that the declaration will spark more research into animals that have often been overlooked, a move that has the potential to further expand our awareness of the scope of consciousness in the animal world. “All these nematode worms and fruit flies that are in almost every university — study consciousness in them,” she said. “You already have them. Somebody in your lab is going to need a project. Make that project a consciousness project. Imagine that!”
A recent experiment suggests the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a quantum wave that connects with the rest of the universe.
When people talk about consciousness, or the mind, it’s always a bit nebulous. Whether we create consciousness in our brains as a function of our neurons firing, or consciousness exists independently of us, there’s no universally accepted scientific explanation for where it comes from or where it lives. However, new research on the physics, anatomy, and geometry of consciousness has begun to reveal its possible form.
In other words, we may soon be able to identify a true architecture of consciousness.
The new work builds upon a theory Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, Ph.D., and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, M.D., first posited in the 1990s: the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (Orch OR). Broadly, it claims that consciousness is a quantum process facilitated by microtubules in the brain’s nerve cells.
Penrose and Hameroff suggested that consciousness is a quantum wave that passes through these microtubules. And that, like every quantum wave, it has properties like superposition (the ability to be in many places at the same time) and entanglement (the potential for two particles that are very far away to be connected).
Plenty of experts have questioned the validity of the Orch OR theory. This is the story of the scientists working to revive it.
Across the Universe
To explain quantum consciousness, Hameroff recently told the TV program Closer To Truth that it must be scale invariant, like a fractal. A fractal is a never-ending pattern that can be very tiny or very huge, and still maintain the same properties at any scale. Normal states of consciousness might be what we consider quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for example. But when you have a heightened state of consciousness, it’s because you’re dealing with quantum-level consciousness that is capable of being in all places at the same time, he explains. That means your consciousness can connect or entangle with quantum particles outside of your brain—anywhere in the universe, theoretically.
An illustration of the brain’s network of neural axons transmitting electrical action potentials. (Getty Images)
Other scientists had an easy way to discard this theory. Efforts to recreate quantum coherence—keeping quantum particles as part of a wave instead of breaking down into discrete and measurable particles—only worked in very cold, controlled environments. Take quantum particles out of that environment and the wave broke down, leaving behind isolated particles. The brain isn’t cold and controlled; it’s quite warm and wet and mushy. Therefore, consciousness couldn’t remain in superposition in the brain, the thinking went. Particles in the brain couldn’t connect with the universe.
But then came discoveries in quantum biology. Turns out, living things use quantum properties even though they’re not cold and controlled.
This is the study of quantum processes in living organisms, like superposition and quantum entanglement, that actually facilitate biological processes beyond the subatomic level.
Photosynthesis, for example, allows a plant to store the energy from a photon, or a quantum particle of light. The light hitting the plant causes the formation of something called an exciton, which carries the energy to where it can be stored in the plant’s reaction center. But to get to the reaction center, it has to navigate structures in the plant—sort of like navigating an unfamiliar neighborhood en route to a dentist appointment. In the end, the exciton must arrive before it burns up all of the energy it’s carrying. In order to find the correct path before the particle’s energy is used up, scientists now say the exciton uses the quantum property of superposition to try all possible paths simultaneously.
New evidence suggests microtubules in our brains may be even better at guarding this quantum coherence than chlorophyll. One of the scientists who worked with the Orch OR team, physicist and oncology professor Jack Tuszynski, Ph.D., recently conducted an experiment with a computational model of a microtubule. His team simulated shining a light into a microtubule, sort of like a photon sending an exciton through a plant structure. They were testing whether the energy transfer from light in the microtubule structure could remain coherent as it does in plant cells. The idea was that if the light lasted long enough before being emitted—a fraction of a second was enough—it indicated quantum coherence.
Specifically, Tuszynski’s team simulated sending tryptophan fluorescence, or ultraviolet light photons that are not visible to the human eye, into microtubules. In a recent interview, Tuszynski reports that, across 22 independent experiments, the excitations from the tryptophan created quantum reactions that lasted up to five nanoseconds. This is thousands of times longer than coherence would be expected to last in a microtubule. It’s also more than long enough to perform the biological functions required. “So we are actually confident that this process is longer lasting in tubulin than … in chlorophyll,” he says. The team published their findings in the journal ACS Central Science earlier this year.
Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.
Tuszynski notes that his team is not the only one sending light into microtubules. A team of professors at the University of Central Florida has been illuminating microtubules with visible light. In those experiments, Tuszynski says, they observed re-emission of this light over hundreds of milliseconds to seconds. “That’s the typical human response time to any sort of stimulus, visual or audio,” he explains. Shining the light into microtubules and measuring how long the microtubules take to emit that light “is a proxy for the stability of certain … postulated quantum states,” he says, “which is kind of key to the theory that these microtubules may be having coherent quantum superpositions that may be associated with mind or consciousness.” Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.
While this is a long way from proving the Orch OR theory, it’s significant and promising data. Penrose and Hameroff continue to push the boundaries, partnering with people like spiritual leader Deepak Chopra to explore expressions of consciousness in the universe that they might be able to identify in the lab in their microtubule experiments. This sort of thing makes many scientists very uncomfortable.
Still, there are researchers exploring what the architecture of such a universal consciousness might look like. One of these ideas comes from the study of weather.
The Architecture of Universal Consciousness
Timothy Palmer, Ph.D., is a mathematical physicist at Oxford who specializes in chaos and climate. (He’s also a big fan of Roger Penrose.) Palmer believes the laws of physics must be fundamentally geometric. The Invariant Set Theory is his explanation of how the quantum world works. Among other things, it suggests that quantum consciousness is the result of the universe operating in a particular fractal geometry “state space.”
That’s a mouthful, but it roughly means we’re stuck in a lane or route of a cosmic fractal shape that is shared by other realities that are also stuck in their trajectories. This notion appears in the final chapter of Palmer’s book, The Primacy of Doubt, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. In it, he suggests the possibility that our experience of free will—of having had the option to choose our lives, as well as our perception that there is a consciousness outside ourselves—is the result of awareness of other universes that share our state space. The idea starts with a special geometry called a Strange Attractor.
You may have heard of the Butterfly Effect, the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wing in one part of the world could affect a hurricane in another part of the world. The term actually refers to a more complex concept developed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963. Lorenz was trying to simplify the equations used to predict how a particular climate condition might evolve. He narrowed it down to three differential equations that could be used to identify the “state space” of a particular weather system. For example, if you had a particular temperature, wind direction, and humidity level, what would happen next? He began to plot the trajectory of weather systems by plugging in different initial conditions into the equations.
He found that if initial conditions were different by even one one-hundredth of a percent, if the humidity was just a fraction higher, or the temperature a hair lower, the trajectories—what happens next—could be wildly different. In the graph, one trajectory might shoot off in one direction, forming loops and spins, seemingly at random, while another creates completely different shapes in the opposite direction. But once Lorenz started to plot them, he found that many of the trajectories wound up circulating within the boundaries of a particular geometric shape known as a strange attractor. It was as if they were cars on a track: the cars might go in any number of directions so long as they didn’t drive it the same way twice and they stayed on the track. The track was the butterfly-shaped Lorenz attractor.
Artwork of a Lorenz attractor, named after Edward Lorenz, who developed a system of ordinary differential equations. In particular, the Lorenz attractor is a set of chaotic solutions of the Lorenz system which, when plotted, resemble a butterfly or figure eight. Minute variations in the initial values of the variables would lead to hugely divergent outcomes. For this phenomenon, of sensitivity to initial conditions, he coined the term butterfly effect. This effect is the underlying mechanism of deterministic chaos.
Palmer believes that our universe may be just one trajectory, one car, on a cosmological state space like the Lorenz attractor. When we imagine “what if …?” scenarios, we’re actually getting information about versions of ourselves in other universes who are also navigating the same strange attractor—others’ “cars” on the track, he explains. This also accounts for our sense of consciousness, of free will, and of being connected with a greater universe.
“I would at least hypothesize that it may well be the case that it’s evolving on very special fractal subsets of all conceivable states in state space,” Palmer tells Popular Mechanics. If his ideas are correct, he says, “then we need to look at the structure of the universe on its very largest scales, because these attractors are really telling us about a kind of holistic geometry for the universe.”
Tuszynksi’s experiment and Palmer’s theory still don’t tell us what consciousness is, but perhaps they tell us where consciousness lives—what kind of a structure houses it. That means it’s not just an ethereal, disembodied concept. If consciousness is housed somewhere, even if that somewhere is a complicated state space, we can find it. And that’s a start.
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These are tubes made of protein lattices, and they form part of the cell’s cytoskeleton, which is its structural network.
Penrose and Hameroff suggested that consciousness is a quantum wave that passes through these microtubules. And that, like every quantum wave, it has properties like superposition (the ability to be in many places at the same time) and entanglement (the potential for two particles that are very far away to be connected).
Plenty of experts have questioned the validity of the Orch OR theory. This is the story of the scientists working to revive it.
Across the Universe
To explain quantum consciousness, Hameroff recently told the TV program Closer To Truth that it must be scale invariant, like a fractal. A fractal is a never-ending pattern that can be very tiny or very huge, and still maintain the same properties at any scale. Normal states of consciousness might be what we consider quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for example. But when you have a heightened state of consciousness, it’s because you’re dealing with quantum-level consciousness that is capable of being in all places at the same time, he explains. That means your consciousness can connect or entangle with quantum particles outside of your brain—anywhere in the universe, theoretically.
An illustration of the brain’s network of neural axons transmitting electrical action potentials. (Getty Images)
Other scientists had an easy way to discard this theory. Efforts to recreate quantum coherence—keeping quantum particles as part of a wave instead of breaking down into discrete and measurable particles—only worked in very cold, controlled environments. Take quantum particles out of that environment and the wave broke down, leaving behind isolated particles. The brain isn’t cold and controlled; it’s quite warm and wet and mushy. Therefore, consciousness couldn’t remain in superposition in the brain, the thinking went. Particles in the brain couldn’t connect with the universe.
But then came discoveries in quantum biology. Turns out, living things use quantum properties even though they’re not cold and controlled.
This is the study of quantum processes in living organisms, like superposition and quantum entanglement, that actually facilitate biological processes beyond the subatomic level.
Photosynthesis, for example, allows a plant to store the energy from a photon, or a quantum particle of light. The light hitting the plant causes the formation of something called an exciton, which carries the energy to where it can be stored in the plant’s reaction center. But to get to the reaction center, it has to navigate structures in the plant—sort of like navigating an unfamiliar neighborhood en route to a dentist appointment. In the end, the exciton must arrive before it burns up all of the energy it’s carrying. In order to find the correct path before the particle’s energy is used up, scientists now say the exciton uses the quantum property of superposition to try all possible paths simultaneously.
New evidence suggests microtubules in our brains may be even better at guarding this quantum coherence than chlorophyll. One of the scientists who worked with the Orch OR team, physicist and oncology professor Jack Tuszynski, Ph.D., recently conducted an experiment with a computational model of a microtubule. His team simulated shining a light into a microtubule, sort of like a photon sending an exciton through a plant structure. They were testing whether the energy transfer from light in the microtubule structure could remain coherent as it does in plant cells. The idea was that if the light lasted long enough before being emitted—a fraction of a second was enough—it indicated quantum coherence.
Specifically, Tuszynski’s team simulated sending tryptophan fluorescence, or ultraviolet light photons that are not visible to the human eye, into microtubules. In a recent interview, Tuszynski reports that, across 22 independent experiments, the excitations from the tryptophan created quantum reactions that lasted up to five nanoseconds. This is thousands of times longer than coherence would be expected to last in a microtubule. It’s also more than long enough to perform the biological functions required. “So we are actually confident that this process is longer lasting in tubulin than … in chlorophyll,” he says. The team published their findings in the journal ACS Central Science earlier this year.
Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.
Tuszynski notes that his team is not the only one sending light into microtubules. A team of professors at the University of Central Florida has been illuminating microtubules with visible light. In those experiments, Tuszynski says, they observed re-emission of this light over hundreds of milliseconds to seconds. “That’s the typical human response time to any sort of stimulus, visual or audio,” he explains. Shining the light into microtubules and measuring how long the microtubules take to emit that light “is a proxy for the stability of certain … postulated quantum states,” he says, “which is kind of key to the theory that these microtubules may be having coherent quantum superpositions that may be associated with mind or consciousness.” Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.
While this is a long way from proving the Orch OR theory, it’s significant and promising data. Penrose and Hameroff continue to push the boundaries, partnering with people like spiritual leader Deepak Chopra to explore expressions of consciousness in the universe that they might be able to identify in the lab in their microtubule experiments. This sort of thing makes many scientists very uncomfortable.
Still, there are researchers exploring what the architecture of such a universal consciousness might look like. One of these ideas comes from the study of weather.
The Architecture of Universal Consciousness
Timothy Palmer, Ph.D., is a mathematical physicist at Oxford who specializes in chaos and climate. (He’s also a big fan of Roger Penrose.) Palmer believes the laws of physics must be fundamentally geometric. The Invariant Set Theory is his explanation of how the quantum world works. Among other things, it suggests that quantum consciousness is the result of the universe operating in a particular fractal geometry “state space.”
That’s a mouthful, but it roughly means we’re stuck in a lane or route of a cosmic fractal shape that is shared by other realities that are also stuck in their trajectories. This notion appears in the final chapter of Palmer’s book, The Primacy of Doubt, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. In it, he suggests the possibility that our experience of free will—of having had the option to choose our lives, as well as our perception that there is a consciousness outside ourselves—is the result of awareness of other universes that share our state space. The idea starts with a special geometry called a Strange Attractor.
You may have heard of the Butterfly Effect, the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wing in one part of the world could affect a hurricane in another part of the world. The term actually refers to a more complex concept developed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963. Lorenz was trying to simplify the equations used to predict how a particular climate condition might evolve. He narrowed it down to three differential equations that could be used to identify the “state space” of a particular weather system. For example, if you had a particular temperature, wind direction, and humidity level, what would happen next? He began to plot the trajectory of weather systems by plugging in different initial conditions into the equations.
He found that if initial conditions were different by even one one-hundredth of a percent, if the humidity was just a fraction higher, or the temperature a hair lower, the trajectories—what happens next—could be wildly different. In the graph, one trajectory might shoot off in one direction, forming loops and spins, seemingly at random, while another creates completely different shapes in the opposite direction. But once Lorenz started to plot them, he found that many of the trajectories wound up circulating within the boundaries of a particular geometric shape known as a strange attractor. It was as if they were cars on a track: the cars might go in any number of directions so long as they didn’t drive it the same way twice and they stayed on the track. The track was the butterfly-shaped Lorenz attractor.
Getty Images
Artwork of a Lorenz attractor, named after Edward Lorenz, who developed a system of ordinary differential equations. In particular, the Lorenz attractor is a set of chaotic solutions of the Lorenz system which, when plotted, resemble a butterfly or figure eight. Minute variations in the initial values of the variables would lead to hugely divergent outcomes. For this phenomenon, of sensitivity to initial conditions, he coined the term butterfly effect. This effect is the underlying mechanism of deterministic chaos.
Palmer believes that our universe may be just one trajectory, one car, on a cosmological state space like the Lorenz attractor. When we imagine “what if …?” scenarios, we’re actually getting information about versions of ourselves in other universes who are also navigating the same strange attractor—others’ “cars” on the track, he explains. This also accounts for our sense of consciousness, of free will, and of being connected with a greater universe.
“I would at least hypothesize that it may well be the case that it’s evolving on very special fractal subsets of all conceivable states in state space,” Palmer tells Popular Mechanics. If his ideas are correct, he says, “then we need to look at the structure of the universe on its very largest scales, because these attractors are really telling us about a kind of holistic geometry for the universe.”
Tuszynksi’s experiment and Palmer’s theory still don’t tell us what consciousness is, but perhaps they tell us where consciousness lives—what kind of a structure houses it. That means it’s not just an ethereal, disembodied concept. If consciousness is housed somewhere, even if that somewhere is a complicated state space, we can find it. And that’s a start.
Dreams often fade away after waking up, but a sizable portion of people can still recall their dreams as they begin their workday. Now, researchers from the University of Notre Dame have found that when someone remembers a dream from the night before, many can’t help but draw connections between their dreams and their waking lives. Those connections, real or not, then end up altering how they think, feel, and act at work.
The team at UND, including lead author Casher Belinda, assistant professor of management at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, and Michael Christian from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explain that earlier research reveals roughly 40 percent of the working population recalls their dreams on an average morning.
“Similar to epiphany, we found that connecting the dots between dreams and reality gives rise to awe — an emotion that sparks a tendency to think about ourselves and our experiences in the grand scheme of things,” Prof. Belinda says in a university release. “This makes subsequent work stressors seem less daunting, bolstering resilience and productivity throughout the workday.”
“People experience awe when they undergo something vast — something that challenges their understanding or way of thinking about things,” the study author continues. “These experiences can come in different forms, whether physical, such as when witnessing aurora borealis, or conceptual, such as when grasping the implications of a grand theory. Awe often borders on the extremes or upper bounds of other emotions, for example, when people experience profound gratitude or admiration. Dreams are conceptually vast experiences that have a striking capacity to elicit feelings of awe.”
Researchers conducted a total of three studies encompassing roughly 5,000 morning-of reports of dream recall among full-time employees. They released a morning-of field study, a single-day morning-to-afternoon study, and a two-week experience sampling study.
These projects discovered that the relationships persisted even after researchers accounted for how much or how well people slept. This suggests that the psychological consequences of recalling and finding meaning in a dream could sometimes offset or mitigate the physiological consequences of poor sleep.
On the surface, dreams may sound like the opposite of a very real workday, but researchers explain that many people are dreaming vividly mere minutes or hours before beginning their professional day. This research shows that when we remember our dreams – which to our sleeping minds are very real – they can influence and set the stage for the rest of our day.
“We arrive at work shortly after interacting with deceased loved ones, narrowly escaping or failing to escape traumatic events and performing acts of immeasurable ability,” Prof. Belinda explains. “Regardless of our personal beliefs about dreams, these experiences bleed into and affect our waking lives — including how productive we are at work.”
(Photo by Yan Krukau from Pexels)
For example, let’s say you remember an awe-inspiring or meaningful dream one morning. Later that same day in the afternoon, your boss tells you to conduct 10 more interviews than you were expecting. Despite the extra work, your recent dream may help you put everything into perspective. Study authors say dreams may help workers realize there’s a bigger world out there and they are just part of it or recognize the interconnected nature of everything.
“Harnessing the benefits of awe may prove invaluable to organizations,” Prof. Belinda adds. “And one of our primary goals was to understand how to do so.”
Of course, researchers stress that everyone’s number one priority should be to get a good night’s sleep. While it’s true that dreams occur during all stages of sleep, Prof. Belinda explains that the most vivid dreams occur during REM sleep. That phase of sleep tends to take place late in a given sleep cycle. So, study authors recommend getting as much sufficient, high-quality sleep as you can to get the most out of your dreams.
They also suggest the use of sleep-tracking devices that indicate when and how much time is spent in REM sleep for anyone looking improve their sleep schedules and perhaps experience more awe-inspiring dreams.
“Also, keep a dream journal to allow meaningful dreams to stick with you,” Prof. Belinda comments. “Recording dreams gives them repeated opportunities to elicit beneficial emotions and make connections between dreams.”
Meanwhile, the research team has a suggestion for managers and employees as well: Promote the “awe experience” at work as much as possible. Besides just dreams, other elicitors of awe include nature, art, music and exposure to senior leaders. These experiences can help increase productivity at work.
The study is published in the Academy of Management Journal.
Freud’s notion of a dark, libidinous unconscious is obsolete. A new theory holds that the brain produces a continuous stream of unconscious predictions
In Brief
Research on the unconscious mind has shown that the brain makes judgments and decisions quickly and automatically. It continuously makes predictions about future events.
According to the theory of the “predictive mind,” consciousness arises only when the brain’s implicit expectations fail to materialize.
Higher cognitive processing in the cerebral cortex can occur without consciousness. The regions of the brain responsible for the emotions and motives, not the cortex, direct our conscious attention.
In 1909 five men converged on Clark University in Massachusetts to conquer the New World with an idea. At the head of this little troupe was psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Ten years earlier Freud had introduced a new treatment for what was called “hysteria” in his book The Interpretation of Dreams. This work also introduced a scandalous view of the human psyche: underneath the surface of consciousness roils a largely inaccessible cauldron of deeply rooted drives, especially of sexual energy (the libido). These drives, held in check by socially inculcated morality, vent themselves in slips of the tongue, dreams and neuroses. The slips in turn provide evidence of the unconscious mind.
At the invitation of psychologist G. Stanley Hall, Freud delivered five lectures at Clark. In the audience was philosopher William James, who had traveled from Harvard University to meet Freud. It is said that, as James departed, he told Freud, “The future of psychology belongs to your work.” And he was right.
The view that human beings are driven by dark emotional forces over which they have little or no control remains widespread. In this conception, the urgings of the conscious mind constantly battle the secret desires of the unconscious. Just how rooted the idea of a dark unconscious has become in popular culture can be seen in the 2015 Pixar film Inside Out. Here the unconscious mind of a girl named Riley is filled with troublemakers and fears and housed in a closed space. People like to think of the unconscious as a place where we can shove uncomfortable thoughts and impulses because we want to believe that conscious thought directs our actions; if it did not, we would seemingly have no control over our lives.
This image could hardly be less accurate, however. Recent research indicates that conscious and the unconscious processes do not usually operate in opposition. They are not competitors wrestling for hegemony over our psyche. They are not even separate spheres, as Freud’s later classification into the ego, id and superego would suggest. Rather there is only one mind in which conscious and unconscious strands are interwoven. In fact, even our most reasonable thoughts and actions mainly result from automatic, unconscious processes.
The Predictive Mind
A revolutionary, and now widely accepted, countermodel to Freud’s scheme goes by the term “predictive mind.” The theory comes in different flavors, but overall it holds that automatic processes play a central role in the mind, allowing us to predict events quickly and accurately as they arise. Learning, experience and consciousness constantly improve our implicit, or unconscious, predictions, and we take note of events only when the predictions fail. That is, we become conscious of circumstances when they merit our attention. This automaticity enables us to function smoothly in the world, and becoming conscious when predictions fail enables us to avoid the pitfalls of automatic processing and adjust to changes in our environment. In a simplified example, unconscious processes predict the trajectory of a ball tossed to us and adjusts our limb motions accordingly. Conscious processing would become engaged, however, if the ball took a sudden right-angle turn.
Like the popular conception of the embattled mind, the predictive mind perspective is rooted in 19th-century precursors. Physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz was the first to hypothesize that the conclusions we arrive at automatically are anchored in perception. Our visual system, for example, readily produces an imaginary triangle out of three strategically placed circles with slices cut out (illustration). According to Helmholtz, such useful illusions proved that preprogrammed mechanisms shape our image of the world without our doing anything at all. The predictive mind model now hypothesizes that this automaticity shapes not only our perceptions but all mental processes, including our judgments, decisions and actions.
The Kanizsa triangle illusion provides evidence that our perception is based on implicit inferences. Our visual system constructs an imaginary triangle as a way to “explain” the arrangement of the circles.
To physically function smoothly in the world, you need your brain to quickly and automatically distinguish between the body’s own actions and external inputs. It accomplishes this feat by creating a so-called efference copyof each command it sends to muscles. When you shake your head back and forth, for example, you know that the external world is not rocking back and forth even though the visual cues reaching the brain might give that impression, because the efference copy indicates that the brain itself gave the motion commands. The efference copy is also the reason you cannot create the same tickle sensation in your own foot that others can induce: when the tickling sensation at the sole of your foot is processed, the areas of the brain responsible for perception of touch are already well informed that your own fingers are doing the job.
The workings of unconscious processes are also evident in a wide variety of other phenomena, such as automatic movements, spontaneous associations, jumping to instant conclusions (an example of what scientists call “implicit inferences”) and perception of subliminal stimuli (those not consciously recognized). Laboratory experiments have shown that test subjects recognize the rule underlying a particular task before they are able to verbalize the rule. In one study design, for example, volunteers are asked to draw cards from two stacks, one that could bring huge hypothetical profits but also massive losses and one that is less risky; the volunteers are not told of the difference between the stacks. Signs of stress, such as increased sweating, will reveal that the subjects sense the pattern—the difference between the stacks—long before they can articulate that one of the piles is risky. As neuroscientist Nicolas Schuck of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin has recently demonstrated, such implicit inferences affect activity in certain parts of the frontal lobe—where decisions are often said to be made—even before the test subjects make their decisions.
The Power of Subliminal Stimuli
Research using a subliminal intervention called priming provides further examples of the ways unconscious processing influences behavior. Experimenters present images, words or even physical sensations in such a way that test subjects either will not notice the stimuli (because the exposure is too brief) or will disregard them (because they presumably have nothing to do with whatever is being focused on). In an example of the latter strategy, psychologists may ask subjects to read texts in which certain words appear multiple times without the words being highlighted and ask control subjects to read a neutral text. If the test subjects display measurable differences in thinking, feeling or acting after reading the text with multiple occurrences of the word, researchers can assume that the text had an unconscious effect.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that subliminal stimulation involving concepts such as aging or death have measurable consequences on behavior. Test subjects move more slowly, for example, or become more responsive to spiritual ideas. The phenomenon is familiar in everyday life. Passing a bakery, people may suddenly remember that they forgot to get the ingredients for a birthday cake. Our unconscious paves the way for our actions.
Such examples confirm that the brain functions along multiple tracks. Compared with a computer, our gray matter chugs along very slowly—but on many parallel levels. Researchers often distinguish between two general strands, however. Nobel laureate in economics Daniel Kahneman calls them System 1 and System 2. Others speak of implicit and explicit or hot versus cold processing. The first strand (System 1, implicit, hot) refers to the rapid, automatic and uncontrollable workings of the unconscious mind; the other strand (System 2, explicit, cold) describes the slow, more flexible conscious processes that are subject to volition. But what is key in the predictive mind conception of mental functioning is that these two strands always work in tandem; in other words, our mind operates both unconsciously and consciously.
The following sentences illustrate the truth of this assertion: Veery nmoral sopern acn dpeciher eseth drows. Talhoguh het telters rae ramscbled, ouy houlsd vahe on ficudiflty unstanddering thaw si geibn dias. Ouy anc od hist ecabuse fo het sursingpri mautoaticity fo het brian! Most people will take only a fraction of a second to become aware of what the next word must be. The autopilot in our brain anticipates the words and quickly sorts the scrambled letters.
A big riddle is what precisely distinguishes conscious from unconscious processes at the neurophysiological level—and how exactly they interact. According to philosopher Peter Carruthers of the University of Maryland, College Park, we are aware only of the material in our working memory: the “user interface,” so to speak. But working memory holds only a vanishingly small fraction of the data we take in. We remain unconscious of most of the input that floods the brain—and feeds System 1, which processes it automatically and quickly.
What does the brain do with these data? It constantly peers into the future, considering, What will happen next? What stimuli are likely to come up? Anything dangerous on the horizon? What are others up to? Such prognostications relate not only to the outer world but to the internal milieu of our bodies. Seen in this light, our desire to eat is nothing more than the unconscious anticipation of an impending loss of energy. Our unconscious aims to maintain homeostasis, to keep our body (including the balance of energy intake and use) in a steady state.
Predictive Neurobiology
Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, who is a strong proponent of the predictive mind theory, has added other insights to the neurobiological basis of unconscious and conscious functioning. In contrast to Freud, he argues that our mind is not seeking greater consciousness but rather the opposite—to keep consciousness to a minimum. As he explains, “You know the Talking Heads song where ‘heaven is a place where nothing, nothing ever happens’? Well, that’s the brain’s preferred state because it is energy- and time-efficient. It’s a survival mechanism.”
In 1909 a delegation of psychoanalysts, including Sigmund Freud (bottom row, left) and Carl Gustav Jung (bottom row, right), attended a conference at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., organized by Stanley Hall (bottom row, center). Freud delivered five lectures.Solms described this idea in a 2018 paper co-authored with Karl Friston of University College London, a key figure in the development of the imaging techniques that have so revolutionized brain research. About 10 years ago Friston introduced the free energy principle, a mathematically formalized version of the theory of the predictive brain. In his definition, free energy in the brain describes the neuronal state that results from the brain’s failure to make a correct prediction; the brain does all it can to avoid free energy. In the final analysis, Solms and Friston assert, predictive errors equal surprise equals consciousness; when things do not work as expected, we get consciousness—a state the brain tries to limit.
This perspective not only stands Freud’s theory on its head, but it also contradicts the classic view that the cortex (the outer layer of the cerebrum) is the source of consciousness. According to Solms, these higher regions are not the bearers of consciousness but instead are “told” what to attend to by deeper structures in the brain stem and midbrain. Solms locates the source of consciousness in the areas of the brain that regulate alertness, emotional stimulation, and drives—precisely those areas where Freud located the unconscious (brain illustration). “The pattern-detection mechanisms of the cortex work most efficiently without conscious attention. It is the deeper, emotional parts of the brain, the limbic structures, from which consciousness arises,” he says.
This hypothesis can be empirically confirmed. Children who as a result of developmental disorders were born without a cerebral cortex are capable of forms of consciousness, for example. Such infants, if they survive into childhood, are not only alert but display emotional reactions. In a 2007 review, neuroscientist Björn Merker concluded that numerous conscious phenomena occur even without a cerebral cortex. Although more complex mental operations such as logical thinking or self-reflection are not possible, emotions such as joy, annoyance or sadness can be experienced.
The brain’s outer rind—the cerebral cortex—is the seat of higher mental functions in traditional views of the brain. But in a model proposed by Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, consciousness arises from activity in lower regions, such as the reticular activating system, the ventral tegmentum and the thalamus. For instance, sensory information—all of which passes through the thalamus—becomes conscious only when it is emotionally or motivationally relevant, in which case the prefrontal and the cingulate cortex direct our attention to it. Meanwhile the striatum and the precuneus play a role in automatic movement control and orientation, which enable us to interact with our environment without giving it a conscious thought. Credit: Falconieri Visuals
The Real Mastermind
Many people stubbornly cling to the old distinction between the instinctive unconscious and rational consciousness, with a preference for the latter. But, as I have shown, this view is untenable. Unconscious processes greatly control our consciousness. Where you direct your attention, what you remember and the ideas you have, what you filter out from the flood of stimuli that bombard you, how you interpret them and what goals you pursue—all these result from automatic processes. Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia considers this reliance on the unconscious to be the price that we pay for survival as a species. If we were forced always to consider every aspect of the situation around us and had to weigh all our options about what to do, humankind would have died out long ago. The autopilot in our brain—not consciousness—makes us what we are.
The real mastermind that solves problems and ensures our survival, then, is the unconscious. It is understandable that people tend to distrust the unconscious, given that it seems uncontrollable. How are we supposed to be in control of something when we do not even know when and how it influences us? Nevertheless, the arrangement works.
John Bargh of Yale University, who studies priming, compares the human mind to a sailor: To steer a boat from point A to point B, a sailor needs to know the destination and be able to make course corrections. Such abilities are not sufficient, however, because, as is true of the unconscious, uncontrollable factors such as ocean currents and wind come into play. But expert sailors take them into account to arrive at their destination.
We do well to treat our unconscious similarly—by not getting in its way. And that is really what we do day in and day out. When I put a picture of my loved ones on my desk to fuel my motivation for work or when I take the stairs instead of the elevator, I am steering my unconscious mind, recognizing that its desires for leisure and rest do not serve my best interests at the moment. And the fact that I am able to do this shows that the conscious and the unconscious are partners rather than opponents.
Reality is not what it appears — the ancients knew it, pioneering physicists of the early 20th century knew it, and current leading edge scientists are proving it — all is mind.
The Big Questions and the Modern Scientific Worldview
Throughout the ages, Mankind has been trying to answer the big questions — What is the nature of existence and reality, what are we, and why are we here? In our current age, with the ascendance of the ideology of scientific materialism, we have a strong tendency to reject anything that doesn’t fit our materialistic paradigm and label it as “mystical”. We have become mesmerized by the material world. Materialism and consumerism run rampant in our society. Lured by the apparent success of the reductionist method that we have used to analyze and understand our world, we have come to view the universe as purely a physical system, working something like a great machine, and with matter being the fundamental substance of reality.
“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” — Nikola Tesla
Our scientific analytical methods have certainly been successful and have led us to understand the inner workings of matter well enough to create many useful technologies. But these successes have erroneously led us to conclude that our materialistic view of the universe must be correct and reject other ideas as “mystical” and backward.
The materialistic paradigm persists in the popular and scientific thought despite plenty of evidence that it is indeed not true. The Theory of Relativity and Quantum Physics have both shown that energy is more fundamental than matter. The pioneers of quantum physics in the early 20th century — Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and others — all came to the same conclusion — that everything is energy and that somehow consciousness is intimately intertwined with it. And yet this insight seems to have been lost since then. Physicists are still chasing the fundamental “particle”, and focusing on material phenomena rather than focusing on what energy is, how it forms matter, and what other forms can it take.
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” — Nikola Tesla
And modern science is still largely ignoring the role of consciousness, despite the observations of quantum phenomena that strongly suggest that consciousness is intimately related to the nature of reality. Mainstream science continues to assume that reality is objective, EG; that it exists independent of the consciousness of the observer despite much evidence to the contrary, and the conclusions of many pioneers of physics.
The accomplished English physicist, astronomer and mathematician, Sir James Jeans, had this to say:
“I incline to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe… In general the universe seems to me to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine. It may well be, it seems to me, that each individual consciousness ought to be compared to a brain-cell in a universal mind.” — Sir James Jeans
And he wasn’t alone, below Max Plank shares a similar viewpoint.
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” — Max Plank
Reality is Not What it Appears
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” — Shakespeare, from Hamlet
Consciousness is probably the most mysterious and significant phenomena in the universe, so to treat it as irrelevant to understanding reality is a major mistake. In fact, there have been some very profound experiments (see this video about these experiments) that leave very little doubt that there is an intimate relationship between consciousness and reality. Leading some to conclude that consciousness is the fundamental substance of the universe, as many esoteric and mystical philosophies throughout the ages have claimed in one way or another.
It’s not surprising that we might get stuck on the idea that matter is the fundamental substance of reality because this idea is just a natural consequence of our perceptual limitations. Our sensory apparatus — sight, hearing, smell, touch — provide us a useful representation of the external world, but when it comes to our primary sensory channel, vision, it is well known that we are “seeing” only are very narrow band of energies. Our eyes detect electromagnetic energy frequencies and convert them to the images and colors that we perceive. But our eyes only detect an extremely small portion of those frequencies, less than 0.00018%. And we are only “seeing” the clumps of energy condensed to a slow vibration (EG; matter). We can’t see all the rest of the energy and how everything is interconnected patterns of energy.
“All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration.” — Bill Hicks
Despite the lesson that the unseen phenomena of electromagnetic radiation should be teaching us we are still largely unaware of how the limitations of our sensory apparatus have conditioned our models of reality. There are many more unseen phenomena we have yet to detect and understand. Our visual perceptions are far less complete than we have ever imagined, and this has led to a tenacious conceptual bias that has colored our models of reality. This bias is interfering with formulating a broader, deeper more accurate model including tackling the big question we’ve been avoiding — what is consciousness and how it is related to reality.
Ancient Cosmological Philosophies — All is Mind
Long before our current scientific age, and for much longer, there were many cultures with a vastly different view of the cosmos. They saw the universe as intelligent and alive in it’s very fabric; they thought of the cosmos as a great mind, and that our earthly reality was in some sense a grand illusion. Philosophy continues to explore the nature of reality and consciousness and debate many alternate perspectives. Among contemporary schools of thought, there are those that resonant with the ancient idea that “all is mind”. This idea has not been lost completely.
“The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual.” — Sir James Jeans, Physicist
Science was born from philosophy but it has long since gone its separate way — science focusing on how things work and FACTS and philosophy focusing on MEANING. This is why humanity has lost its heart and it’s soul — facts without meaning are like a ship without a rudder.
Modern science would have us believe that life, consciousness, and intelligence somehow emerged from the mechanizations of the universe by random chance, however improbable. That they were essentially accidents, and hence have no deeper meaning. Yet there are those who believe that it is all deeply meaningful and by design, and hence purposeful.
The Primordial Energy Field and The Emergence of Consciousness
Modern science is beginning to embrace that all is energy and is moving towards a unified energetic field theory, but they still have no clue how deep the rabbit hole goes. When they figure out the deeper intricacies of atomic energetics and molecular and bio-molecular energetics amazing advancements in technologies will be possible. And as this unfolds they will begin to realize that consciousness is a process in the energetic field and we will finally bid farewell to the materialistic view of reality that’s has dominated our thinking for so long.
Exactly how consciousness could emerge in the energetic field is unclear but a branch of information and computational theory may ultimately have the answer. Cellular Automata Theory claims that highly complex and organized patterns and dynamics can emerge from very simple systems containing discrete cells, with a small sets of states, and rules that govern how nearby cells are affected. And this structure has an interesting similarity to the base predicates of a number of obscure but compelling unified field theories (Zero Point Field Theory, Reciprocal System Theory, and others). Presumably one of these complex dynamical patterns is the process of consciousness itself — the omni-present intelligence and awareness that permeates the energetic field, the fabric of the universe.
For a very interesting account of the scientific discoveries that have been unfolding over the past twenty years or so related to the energetic field and it’s connections with consciousness check the book The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe.
According to Guy Needler, in his book The History of God, consciousness emerged in a small part of the universal energetic field and gradually increased in awareness until it was fully sentient. At that point it decided to explore what it was by experimenting with what it could do. It quickly realized that its thoughts created energy patterns in the field that it existed in. It also discovered that it could divide its consciousness and focal point of awareness into many smaller parts and perceive from many different perspectives at the same time. We are each a one of these divisions. We are all threads of the universal consciousness, and it is experiencing everything we are experiencing.
In the universal mind thoughts are patterns of energy, and these patterns of energy are everything we see — light, matter, galaxies, stars, planets — and everything we can’t see. And there’s a lot more going on in the part that we can’t see than most of us imagine. The space that we think of as the one Universe, and with one reality actually holds many parallel realities, which are often referred to as the dimensions or planes of reality.
Because source consciousness is creating all that is with it thoughts and each of us is a thread of source consciousness, our thoughts are also creative. We don’t realize this because we have forgotten what we are, but we are creating our reality with our thoughts, on an individual and collective basis, all the time. This is not obvious because our thoughts are erratic and undisciplined, hence our creation is undirected and incoherent. If we embrace our creative power and consciously master our thoughts, we will begin to create coherently. And then it will become obvious that we are indeed creating our reality and we’ll begin to create the life of our dreams, and collectively the world of our dreams. Check out my article Are You Creating Your Reality? Manifesting 101 to learn more about conscious creation, often called manifesting.
“A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction.” — R.C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Within the Mind-Scape
All that is — the galaxies, stars, planets, light, matter, you and me — everything we can see, and everything we can’t see are the inner workings of the cosmic mind — the universe is conscious in its very fabric, and we are inside of it! This consciousness, in fact, encompasses many universes and a vast number of parallel realities. It is the source of all that is, including our own consciousness and that of every sentient entity in the universe.
We exist in a mindscape, a realm of ideas made manifest. We exist inside of a cosmic mind that is creating a multitude of environments and experiences to explore all the possibilities of existence and expand its understanding of self. It is all constructions of thought within the cosmic mind. You are a construct we call a person, and you are within a construct that we call the universe and the world. You are a vehicle that source consciousness is experiencing through. You are an aperture that it is using to look out onto, and experience, one of the many environments that it has created.
You are a focal point of source consciousness’s awareness looking out from inside of one of its own thoughts and experiencing them. Through its thoughts, it is forming a multitude of parallel realities, and then diving in and exploring them, experiencing them. All realities, all worlds, are INNER WORLDS. This why it is said that to know thyself and know the truth you only need to GO WITHIN. Everything is within the unbounded mind of source consciousness, and it is all within you because you are it. You are a thought within a thought within a thought experiencing itself.
“We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.” — Bill Hicks
“All that we see or seem, Is but a dream within a dream.” — Edgar Allen Poe
The Universal Mind is Infinite, and What It Can Create is Limitless
The universe is infinite simply because it is a conceptual space, a realm of ideas and imagination, which makes it inherently unbounded. What it can create is only limited by its imagination, and it’s imagination is limitless.
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” — Albert Einstein
Each and everyone one of us is a part of this infinite mind, and we all potentially wield its unlimited creative power because we are it. The only thing that limits us is our beliefs and imagination! Wake up to what you truly are and be amazed at what you can create.
New evidence has linked fluoride and other chemicals to brain disorders. What other unknown effects might this industrial by-product added to our water supply have? An examination of water fluoridation’s shadowy history reveals potentially disturbing ramifications for human consciousness.
Recent research has brought the controversial practice of water fluoridation back into the spotlight, revealing links between water fluoridation and brain disorders, particularly in regard to its effect on children.
Troublingly, the report found that side-effects do not only come from direct ingestion by children, but also from higher levels of chemicals such as fluoride in expectant mothers’ blood and urine, which was linked to brain disorders and lower IQs in their children. In many cases, the changes triggered can be permanent. This evidence flies right in the face of spurious claims by skeptics that ingestion of fluoride in low concentrations has no harmful effects on our health.
Is it any wonder then that only seven countries in the world actually fluoridate more than 50 percent of their water supply? Although it is often portrayed in America as if every country does it, this is very far from the truth. In fact, the United States accounts for more than 50 percent of all the fluoridated water drinkers in the world, while the vast majority of European countries for example avoid this practice altogether.
So what is fluoride and why do a few countries continue to infuse their public drinking water with this controversial chemical? What ramifications might its side effects have for human development?
How Water Fluoridation Came to Be
Although there is widespread acceptance that fluoride is toxic in high doses, a trend emerged in the twentieth century to add this chemical to drinking water at dosages deemed to be “safe.” Where did this trend originate?
It may surprise you to hear that apparently the first occurrence of purposefully putting sodium fluoride into drinking water took place in the German ghettos of the 30s and 40s, and shortly thereafter in Nazi concentration camps.* Clearly, the Nazis would not be concerned with the strength and resilience of their prisoners’ teeth; so, what could be the real reason to fluoridate the water? What effects does it really have upon us? And why are countries such as the United States still doing it?
Let’s now look at how water fluoridation started in America. An industry researcher from the Mellon Institute financed by the Alcoa Company first recommended water fluoridation in America in 1939. Seeing as Alcoa had toxic waste, a bi-product from aluminum otherwise known as fluoride and stood to benefit from finding a way to sell and dispose of it, could this really be a coincidence? The report convinced dentists and the public at large that water fluoridation is good for our teeth. With this, whether intended or not, the industry gained a way to get toxic waste off their hands, and moreover, even be paid to get rid of it—by selling it off to be dumped into the public water supply.
In 1946, an attorney and former counsel to Alcoa was appointed to head the U.S. Public Health Service. Shortly thereafter, he ensured that the water fluoridation “experiment” passed essentially unchallenged and unchecked by any real public study or research and was soon given a $750K private bonus from Alcoa. In today’s dollars, that’s worth anywhere from $6.89 million to $55.3 million, depending on how you account for inflation.
But some people have identified a more sinister agenda behind water fluoridation that goes beyond apparent greed and convenience. At the end of World War II, Charles Elliot Perkins, a researcher in chemistry, biochemistry, physiology, and pathology, was sent to Germany to take charge of their chemical plants. He later wrote in response to what he had seen and heard while there: “The real purpose behind water fluoridation is to reduce the resistance of the masses to domination and control and loss of liberty … Repeated doses of infinitesimal amounts of fluorine will in time gradually reduce the individual’s power to resist domination by slowly poisoning and narco-tizing this area of the brain tissue, and make him submissive to the will of those who wish to govern him.”
How Fluoride Suppresses Consciousness
Pineal gland parenchyma with calcifications. Attribution: Wiki User Difu Wu.
But how does a chemical bi-product dumped into the water supply actually work upon those who ingest it over time? There are many ways sodium fluoride consumption affects our bodies, but one aspect we’ll focus on in this article is that sodium fluoride calcifies the pineal gland. British scientist Jennifer Luke published a study which found that fluoride deposits tended to accumulate in the pineal gland and calcify it. In addition, a 450 page review on fluoride toxicity published by the National Research Council in 2006 reported that fluoride produced a range of negative side effects including “decreased melatonin production” and “other effects on normal pineal function, which in turn could contribute to a variety of effects in humans.”
Not just scientists, but mystics too have explored the effects of the pineal gland within us (from different angles): physically, it plays an important role in regulating sleep patterns and sexual development; spiritually, it is said to be a connection between the body and the soul, and is referred to by some as our “third eye.” Either way, when the pineal gland is calcified by sodium fluoride, it obviously cannot function properly. This could have grave effects both physically and spiritually upon humanity.
There is more to the human body than its physical apparatus. This is widely evident in phenomenon such as near-death experiences, whereby people have had accounts of experiencing existence while their brain and body has been clinically dead. However, while we are here physically, the spiritual components depend upon the physical apparatus in order to function properly and thereby communicate and actively participate in the physical world. When an important seat of consciousness such as the pineal gland cannot function properly, by logical extension, consciousness itself cannot function properly within us, since the physical means with which it functions in the world has been damaged.
Thus, it is not only that fluoride consumption has adverse health effects and reputedly makes people easier to control (as the Nazi’s believed), but the very spiritual essence of who we are, our consciousness, can be hindered from manifesting in our lives. Within our consciousness are all the spiritual feelings such as love, peace, happiness, and freedom, as well as mystical experiences and psychic faculties. The consciousness gives us the ability to be “here,” “awake,” and present psychologically.
There are sinister agents in the world and beyond who wish to see consciousness suppressed. There appears to be an evil behind water fluoridation that runs deeper than mere convenience, and the implications go beyond fluoride’s reputed effects of making a people compliant who would otherwise question questionable things (such as water fluoridation – the irony notwithstanding). On the deepest level, it’s about a person’s individual ability to awaken consciousness and experience their full potential.
Consciousness isn’t something scientists like to talk about much. You can’t see it, you can’t touch it, and despite the best efforts of certain researchers, you can’t quantify it. And in science, if you can’t measure something, you’re going to have a tough time explaining it.
But consciousness exists, and it’s one of the most fundamental aspects of what makes us human. And just like dark matter and dark energy have been used to fill some otherwise gaping holes in the standard model of physics, researchers have also proposed that it’s possible to consider consciousness as a new state of matter.
To be clear, this is just a hypothesis, and one to be taken with a huge grain of salt, because we’re squarely in the realm of the hypothetical here, and there’s plenty of room for holes to be poked.
But it’s part of a quietly bubbling movement within theoretical physics and neuroscience to try and attach certain basic principles to consciousness in order to make it more observable.
The hypothesis was first put forward in 2014 by cosmologist and theoretical physicist Max Tegmark from MIT, who proposed that there’s a state of matter – just like a solid, liquid, or gas – in which atoms are arranged to process information and give rise to subjectivity, and ultimately, consciousness.
The name of this proposed state of matter? Perceptronium, of course.
“Generations of physicists and chemists have studied what happens when you group together vast numbers of atoms, finding that their collective behaviour depends on the pattern in which they are arranged: the key difference between a solid, a liquid, and a gas lies not in the types of atoms, but in their arrangement.
In this paper, I conjecture that consciousness can be understood as yet another state of matter. Just as there are many types of liquids, there are many types of consciousness.
However, this should not preclude us from identifying, quantifying, modelling, and ultimately understanding the characteristic properties that all liquid forms of matter (or all conscious forms of matter) share.”
In other words, Tegmark isn’t suggesting that there are physical clumps of perceptronium sitting somewhere in your brain and coursing through your veins to impart a sense of self-awareness.
Rather, he proposes that consciousness can be interpreted as a mathematical pattern – the result of a particular set of mathematical conditions.
Just as there are certain conditions under which various states of matter – such as steam, water, and ice – can arise, so too can various forms of consciousness, he argues.
Figuring out what it takes to produce these various states of consciousness according to observable and measurable conditions could help us get a grip on what it actually is, and what that means for a human, a monkey, a flea, or a supercomputer.
The idea was inspired by the work of neuroscientist Giulio Tononi from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who proposed in 2008 that if you wanted to prove that something had consciousness, you had to demonstrate two specific traits.
According to his integrated information theory (IIT), the first of these traits is that a conscious being must be capable of storing, processing, and recalling large amounts of information.
“And second,” explains the arXiv.org blog, “this information must be integrated in a unified whole, so that it is impossible to divide into independent parts.”
This means that consciousness has to be taken as a whole, and cannot be broken down into separate components. A conscious being or system has to not only be able to store and process information, but it must do so in a way that forms a complete, indivisible whole, Tononi argued.
If it occurred to you that a supercomputer could potentially have these traits, that’s sort of what Tononi was getting at.
As George Johnson writes for The New York Times, Tononi’s hypothesis predicted – with a whole lot of maths – that “devices as simple as a thermostat or a photoelectric diode might have glimmers of consciousness – a subjective self”.
In Tononi’s calculations, those “glimmers of consciousness” do not necessarily equal a conscious system, and he even came up with a unit, called phi or Φ, which he said could be used to measure how conscious a particular entity is.
Six years later, Tegmark proposed that there are two types of matter that could be considered according to the integrated information theory.
The first is ‘computronium’, which meets the requirements of the first trait of being able to store, process, and recall large amounts of information. And the second is ‘perceptronium’, which does all of the above, but in a way that forms the indivisible whole Tononi described.
In his paper, Tegmark explores what he identifies as the five basic principles that could be used to distinguish conscious matter from other physical systems such as solids, liquids, and gases – “the information, integration, independence, dynamics, and utility principles”.
He then spends 30 pages or so trying to explain how his new way of thinking about consciousness could explain the unique human perspective on the Universe.
As the arXiv.org blog explains, “When we look at a glass of iced water, we perceive the liquid and the solid ice cubes as independent things even though they are intimately linked as part of the same system. How does this happen? Out of all possible outcomes, why do we perceive this solution?”
It’s an incomplete thought, because Tegmark doesn’t have a solution. And as you might have guessed, it’s not something that his peers have been eager to take up and run with. But you can read his thoughts as they stand in the journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals.
That’s the problem with something like consciousness – if you can’t measure your attempts to measure it, how can you be sure you’ve measured it at all?
More recently, scientists have attempted to explain how human consciousness could be transferred into an artificial body – seriously, there’s a start-up that wants to do this – and one group of Swiss physicists have suggested consciousness occurs in ‘time slices’that are hundreds of milliseconds apart.
As Matthew Davidson, who studies the neuroscience of consciousness at Monash University in Australia, explains over at The Conversation, we still don’t know much about what consciousness actually is, but it’s looking more and more likely that it’s something we need to consider outside the realm of humans.
“If consciousness is indeed an emergent feature of a highly integrated network, as IIT suggests, then probably all complex systems – certainly all creatures with brains – have some minimal form of consciousness,” he says.
“By extension, if consciousness is defined by the amount of integrated information in a system, then we may also need to move away from any form of human exceptionalism that says consciousness is exclusive to us.”
Lanza is an expert in regenerative medicine and scientific director of Advanced Cell Technology Company. Before he has been known for his extensive research which dealt with stem cells, he was also famous for several successful experiments on cloning endangered animal species.
But not so long ago, the scientist became involved with physics, quantum mechanics and astrophysics. This explosive mixture has given birth to the new theory of biocentrism, which the professor has been preaching ever since. Biocentrism teaches that life and consciousness are fundamental to the universe. It is consciousness that creates the material universe, not the other way around.
Lanza points to the structure of the universe itself, and that the laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be fine-tuned for life, implying intelligence existed prior to matter. He also claims that space and time are not objects or things, but rather tools of our animal understanding. Lanza says that we carry space and time around with us “like turtles with shells.” meaning that when the shell comes off (space and time), we still exist.
The theory implies that death of consciousness simply does not exist. It only exists as a thought because people identify themselves with their body. They believe that the body is going to perish, sooner or later, thinking their consciousness will disappear too. If the body generates consciousness, then consciousness dies when the body dies. But if the body receives consciousness in the same way that a cable box receives satellite signals, then of course consciousness does not end at the death of the physical vehicle. In fact, consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space. It is able to be anywhere: in the human body and outside of it. In other words, it is non-local in the same sense that quantum objects are non-local.
Lanza also believes that multiple universes can exist simultaneously. In one universe, the body can be dead. And in another it continues to exist, absorbing consciousness which migrated into this universe. This means that a dead person while traveling through the same tunnel ends up not in hell or in heaven, but in a similar world he or she once inhabited, but this time alive. And so on, infinitely. It’s almost like a cosmic Russian doll afterlife effect.
2. MULTIPLE WORLDS
This hope-instilling, but extremely controversial theory by Lanza has many unwitting supporters, not just mere mortals who want to live forever, but also some well-known scientists. These are the physicists and astrophysicists who tend to agree with existence of parallel worlds and who suggest the possibility of multiple universes. Multiverse (multi-universe) is a so-called scientific concept, which they defend. They believe that no physical laws exist which would prohibit the existence of parallel worlds.
The first one was a science fiction writer H.G. Wells who proclaimed in 1895 in his story “The Door in the Wall”. And after 62 years, this idea was developed by Dr. Hugh Everett in his graduate thesis at the Princeton University. It basically posits that at any given moment the universe divides into countless similar instances. And the next moment, these “newborn” universes split in a similar fashion. In some of these worlds you may be present: reading this article in one universe, or watching TV in another.
The triggering factor for these multiplyingworlds is our actions, explained Everett. If we make some choices, instantly one universe splits into two with different versions of outcomes.
In the 1980s, Andrei Linde, scientist from the Lebedev’s Institute of physics, developed the theory of multiple universes. He is now a professor at Stanford University. Linde explained: Space consists of many inflating spheres, which give rise to similar spheres, and those, in turn, produce spheres in even greater numbers, and so on to infinity. In the universe, they are spaced apart. They are not aware of each other’s existence. But they represent parts of the same physical universe.
The fact that our universe is not alone is supported by data received from the Planck space telescope. Using the data, scientists have created the most accurate map of the microwave background, the so-called cosmic relic background radiation, which has remained since the inception of our universe. They also found that the universe has a lot of dark recesses represented by some holes and extensive gaps.
Theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton from the North Carolina University with her colleagues argue: the anomalies of the microwave background exist due to the fact that our universe is influenced by other universes existing nearby. And holes and gaps are a direct result of attacks on us by neighboring universes.
3. SOUL
So, there is abundance of places or other universes where our soul could migrate after death, according to the theory of neo-biocentrism. But does the soul exist? Is there any scientific theory of consciousness that could accommodate such a claim? According to Dr. Stuart Hameroff, a near-death experience happens when the quantum information that inhabits the nervous system leaves the body and dissipates into the universe. Contrary to materialistic accounts of consciousness, Dr. Hameroff offers an alternative explanation of consciousness that can perhaps appeal to both the rational scientific mind and personal intuitions.
Consciousness resides, according to Stuart and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose, in the microtubules of the brain cells, which are the primary sites of quantum processing. Upon death, this information is released from your body, meaning that your consciousness goes with it. They have argued that our experience of consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in these microtubules, a theory which they dubbed orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR).
Consciousness, or at least proto-consciousness is theorized by them to be a fundamental property of the universe, present even at the first moment of the universe during the Big Bang. “In one such scheme proto-conscious experience is a basic property of physical reality accessible to a quantum process associated with brain activity.”
Our souls are in fact constructed from the very fabric of the universe – and may have existed since the beginning of time. Our brains are just receivers and amplifiers for the proto-consciousness that is intrinsic to the fabric of space-time. So is there really a part of your consciousness that is non-material and will live on after the death of your physical body?
Dr Hameroff told the Science Channel’s Through the Wormhole documentary: “Let’s say the heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing, the microtubules lose their quantum state. The quantum information within the microtubules is not destroyed, it can’t be destroyed, it just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large”. Robert Lanza would add here that not only does it exist in the universe, it exists perhaps in another universe. If the patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says “I had a near death experience”
He adds: “If they’re not revived, and the patient dies, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”
This account of quantum consciousness explains things like near-death experiences, astral projection, out of body experiences, and even reincarnation without needing to appeal to religious ideology. The energy of your consciousness potentially gets recycled back into a different body at some point, and in the mean time it exists outside of the physical body on some other level of reality, and possibly in another universe.
String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”.
Physicist Edward Witten: “I think consciousness will remain a mystery… I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness.”
I’ve been writing a lot lately about consciousness, the ultimate enigma. I used to think why there is something rather than nothing is the ultimate enigma. But without mind, there might as well be nothing.
Some mind-ponderers, notably philosopher Colin McGinn, argue that consciousness is unsolvable. Philosopher Owen Flanagan calls these pessimists “mysterians,” after the 60’s-era rock group “Question Mark and the Mysterians.”
Recently, physicist Edward Witten came out as a mysterian. Witten is regarded with awe by his fellow physicists, some of whom have compared him to Einstein and Newton. He is largely responsible for the popularity of string theory over the past several decades. String theory holds that all of nature’s forces stem from infinitesimal particles wriggling in a hyperspace consisting of many extra dimensions.
Witten is optimistic about science’s power to solve mysteries, such as why there is something rather than nothing. In a 2014 Q&A with me he said: “The modern scientific endeavor has been going on for hundreds of years by now, and we’ve gotten way farther than our predecessors probably imagined.” He also reaffirmed his belief that string theory will turn out to be “right.”
I think consciousness will remain a mystery. Yes, that’s what I tend to believe. I tend to think that the workings of the conscious brain will be elucidated to a large extent. Biologists and perhaps physicists will understand much better how the brain works. But why something that we call consciousness goes with those workings, I think that will remain mysterious. I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness…
Just because Witten is a genius does not mean he is infallible. He is wrong, I believe, that string theory will eventually be validated, and he could be wrong that consciousness will never be explained. I nonetheless find it newsworthy—and refreshing–that a scientist of his caliber is talking so candidly about the limits of science. For reasons that are perhaps too obvious, I like Ash Jogalekar’s take on Witten’s comments. An excerpt:
It’s interesting to contrast Witten’s thoughts with John Horgan’s End of Science thesis… The end of science really is the end of the search for final causation. In that sense not just consciousness but many aspects of the world may always remain a mystery. Whether that is emotionally pleasing or disconcerting is an individual choice that each one of us has to make.
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