Consciousness and the Universe

There is much to say about building upon the great insights of those who preceded us. I feel that many concepts have been defined in the past and others have been restated in countless different ways over the course of humanity. As we go down the stream of consciousness, we look upstream hoping to gain a more comprehensive understanding of our universal landscape. The discussion on content and process reminds me of two quotations from the legendary philosopher Laozi, or I should say, the book Dao De Jing 道德經. Translating is a subjective endeavor. I have a preference for the 1967 work in French done by Liou Kia-Hway.  The closest to the meaning that Liou Kia-Hway tried to convey might be even more clearly stated by Professor Gu Zhengkun from Beijing University and in a lesser extent Lin Yutang (1948) :

I understand the Tao (Dao 道) to be the flow “prior to that of the ‘things’ that can be seen to form and dissolve in this flow”( Bohm, p.14) and that “what we call empty space contains an immense background of energy, and that matter as we know it is a small, ‘quantized’ wavelike excitation on top of this background, rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea…it may be said that space, which has so much energy, is full rather than empty” (Bohm, p.242). In chapter X entitled Process (Process and Reality: An essay on cosmology, 1929), Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “in the sentence 'all things flow,' there are three words - and we have started by isolating the last word of the three. We move backwards to the next word 'things' and ask, What sort of things flow? Finally, we reach the first word 'all' and ask, What is the meaning of the 'many' things engaged in this common flux, and in what sense if any, can the word 'all' refer to a definitely indicated set of these many things?”. All things are encompassed in our known Universe in a process defined as “an ordered and structured inner movement that is essential to what things are” (Bohm, p.16).

Particles are a quintessential part of our phenomenological realm. They carry information via disturbances of space and matter. Their specific wavelengths have left an indelible mark over 13 billion years ago on the blackbody radiation of the cosmic microwave background. At the core of the energy-content flow,  the wave-particle duality defines the inextricable links woven between time and space.  In my own tendency to fragment all the things that flow, I wonder whether everything is made of waves. One may inquire about the deepest level of movement which might “be analyzable into yet finer particles which will perhaps turn out to be the ultimate substance of the whole reality. However, the notion that all is flux… denies such a supposition. Rather, it implies that any describable event, object, entity, etc., is an abstraction from an unknown and undefinable totality of flowing movement”(Bohm, p.62). The shorter the wavelength, the more undefinable the measurement of space and time is. “Beyond this, the whole notion of space and time fades out “into something that is at present unspecifiable” (Bohm, p.241).

What is a wave traveling through spacetime? A shape that curves endlessly in the undetectable wind. Microwaves, radio waves, sound waves, gravitational waves are some of the clues used in the coordinated effort undertaken in the field of multi-messenger astronomy. Particle-like or wave-like behavior depends on the experimental apparatus they are confronted by.  In the interplay between electromagnetic wavelengths and colors, we are speaking the language of our instruments that deliver to us visual images of space events that happened thousands or millions of light-years away.

Waves might be matter-less but they are not information-less. In one study, the detection of far-infrared wavelengths and submillimeter emission from a supernova remnant was key to pinpoint the presence of presolar grains of silica.  In another, an international team of astronomers was able to conduct multiwavelength surveys as well as submillimeter and molecular observations of a star-forming region composed of two dusty ring-like structures located some 5,900 light years from the Earth and about 850 light years above the galactic plane. Furthermore, a study describes for the first time after it was theoretically proposed 45 years ago, how the invisible electric and magnetic forces that surround Earth are responding to impulses that are mostly originating from the solar wind. The 5 NASA THEMIS probes were able to detect the boundary's oscillations and the resulting sounds within the Earth's magnetic shield.

Does a gravitational wave travel like an unseeable wave in the dark ocean or a ripple on an invisible lake?  My understanding is that gravitons and gravitational waves are to be looked at through the concept of wave-particle duality. Massless or massive, gravitons might be the key to better understanding dark matter. Gravitational waves reach us from distant sources through “an imperfect fluid”, the cold dark matter whose dominant effect is “a small frequency dependent modification of the propagation speed of gravitational waves”. Since experiments started in the 1960s, the first direct detection of gravitational waves,  whose existence was predicted by Albert Einstein, occurred on September 14, 2015, at the two LIGO sites in Hanford, WA, and Livingston, LA.

Within the flow that takes us down the stream of consciousness, is everything a wave or is the analogy being overused?  In my own frame of reference, a wave is the DNA imprint of the Universe, i.e. all universal things, traveling through space and time, a chain of light and sound coiling around each other.

I enjoy creative writing, the very first ideas and original sparks that rise from a swirl of images, experiences, and thoughts. Owing to their ability to discriminate what is,  scientists can effectively express their thoughts and convey to a larger audience their gained wisdom with an intuitive choice of words that resonate with truth, as Arthur Eddington and Herman Wyel did. The two quotes below describe the human experience of the Universe :

Why does consciousness inhabit my so-called body, the physical process I experience? I had that weird feeling the other day looking at my little finger. I broke my pinkie when I was five, a palpable memory of my autobiographical self but so alien to the adult I am today. Lost in the past is the memory of that event. “Oh, that’s right,” I recalled, “I did break my finger”. The “greatly elongated” human form that I am “with considerable extension in time and insignificant extension in space” is going through a process since birth at the physiological, mental and spiritual level. Marked with an expiration stamp, whoever we were as children or even ten years ago has moved on one brief ontological stage after another in a process whose result is forever becoming. Thomas Laycock said:

We owe our perception of time and space to our primordial instincts. They are tools for our mind to cope with reality. Amidst unstoppable processes, we know that we are not the endgame but an interlude,  an episode in a biological process, a brief event in the Universe. Life is an infinite game that started on Earth billions of years ago and neither you nor I will be here to see the future of this process whose rules evolve unceasingly. Caught amidst those processes, we might ask ourselves whether time and consciousness are two faces of one mystery (Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| July 2010 | Vol. 1 | Issue 5 | pp. 482-639). William A. Adams answers as follows :

Life unfolds in an endless replication process constantly guided by the repeated nudge of evolution. There is existence only in time.The stars are processes too. In their life cycle, massive stars become supernovas, some transform into black holes, others into neutron stars. From the infinitely large to the infinitely small, sound and visual patterns are universal signs of a process that is happening when moons affect tides, oceans regulate climates, planets tilt on their axis and asteroids collide with other celestial bodies.

Life in every form and at every level is a process of regulation and organization from cells to ecosystems. “In the elementary grammar of the world," wrote Carlo Rovelli, "there is neither space nor time  -only processes that transform physical quantities from one to another, from which it is possible to calculate probabilities and relations “(The order of time, Riverhead books, 2018, p.195). Time is not absolute. It is a conventionally designed tool. The only thing that we objectively know of time is the present because that is the only thing that we can say we are experiencing in the now. However, since we know that when we gaze at the stars, we are looking back in time, we can reasonably say as well that the past does exist.

At the same time, we know that the present is a vanishing entity that we are helplessly chasing. As soon as we stand in the now, it has already gone in the past. What is now anyway? A brief second? A day? A year? We are uncertain of its limit and scope, for we are in a state of becoming. In reality, every second that passes is part of the past and the next is part of the future. When some say that time does not exist, that is because the present time is indeed an illusion. Still, “there is a universal conscious now which hosts the passage of time”.  Bergson talked about our ability to perceive simultaneous flows - be an instant, a lifetime or the life cycle of a star - because “we have learned to spatialize time”. For the reason that we are these“greatly elongated” human forms “with considerable extension in time and insignificant extension in space”, we are all the more conscious of this being our known Universe in which we, animals, plants, humans, live side by side carrying on with our daily activities in parallel, for time runs through “multiple flows within one flow”. If we dare to say that consciousness lives in each one of us simultaneously, I remain ambivalent about my own intuitive impression that those billions of flows run through a single universal Consciousness. Is consciousness “coextensive with the universe” or, compared to the duration of the Universe, just an “infinitesimal consciousness” “coextensive with our conscious life”? We can only say that those billions of flows, meticulously regulated by time and deeply felt by our consciousness, are processes occurring in the phenomenological realm.

My own consciousness, seemingly unaware, wonders whether electromagnetic fields are coextensive with the Universe and whether we have to believe that anything else is simply random manifestations in the process.

There are concepts related to emergence, information, and gravity, and properties like colors that point to a sense of universality. As the full Moon passed through the shadow of Earth, it appeared orange, reminding me of fall colors when the weather turns cold. The same orange glow seems to radiate through the cosmic microwave background (CMB) formed about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. As the Universe cooled down, the symmetry between the different species of elementary particles broke in a phase transition analogous to the freezing of water.

The answer to the following question eludes me: if we experience the expansion of the Universe, what is beyond our Universe that allows it to expand? It is not the question that matters but the way you formulate it. A scientist who would attempt to use quantum mechanics in theoretical cosmology might rephrase the unsolved problem this way:

According to Erik Verlinde’s paper “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” what defines the expansion - that is gravity and space-time geometry - is emergent. And so, if gravity is emergent, when and how did it emerge? Verlinde adds that gravity could arise from a microscopic description that doesn’t know about its existence and that the link between the universe without gravity and the universe with gravity is information  “measured in terms of entropy.” As Carlo Rovelli wrote in his book The Order of Time (Riverhead books, 2018, p.34), entropy is “nothing other than the number of microscopic states that our blurred vision of the world fails to distinguish” and depends on the peculiar coupling between us and the rest of the universe. In the context of the uncertainties that we face as observers when we attempt to measure the true value of past and future events, the increase of entropy stems from our own assessment and prediction of what matter will become in macroscopic observables. Rovelli specifies that for any time evolution, there is a system split into subsystems such that the initial state has zero entropy, and then entropy grows.  

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) looks like a patchwork of colors guiding us into the past and the future, a thermal map from which we aim to deduce distances in time and space. The CMB gives a unique perspective on the distribution patterns,  how tightly matter was clustered throughout the young Universe, and how fast it is fragmenting and reorganizing. Its growth evolution seems to hint at a nonexisting phenomenon whose resulting dynamics we observe. In the discussion on gravity, two discoveries help create an image of a time-space geometry in my head. My mind drives through an interconnected system of one-way streets, from ideas to pictures and concepts to visual representations. Those mental images foster an internal dialogue that helps me to enter a new level of consciousness as I visualize new ideas and concepts.

First, the discovery of a 13.5 billion-year-old low-mass star,  the most metal-poor star ever to be observed, located about 20 000 light-years away in a binary system, would place it about at the time when the CMB was imprinted. Second, the farthest individual star ever to be seen, a blue supergiant star named Icarus, would have been just a flicker if it had not been for the magnifying effect of gravitational lens. Since its light has taken 9 billion years to reach Earth, it appeared to us as it was when the Universe was about 4-5 billion years old, at the time of the earliest form of life on Earth, perhaps hidden inside the fissure of a rock, potentially, along with billions of other specks of life spread across the Universe escaping slowly from their rocky cradle. Icarus is long gone, but its existence has reached our consciousness only today. I visualize the depth of the spatial layout and struggle to add the factor time in the equation. I wonder what the biosignature of our young Universe was like then and imagine billions of microorganisms feeling the soft push and pull of gravity for the first time. Is life still hidden today in a lunar rock, on Mars, Venus, or on an exoplanet waiting to escape?  

The Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to be in orbit in 2021 at more than 1 million miles from the Earth, will have the capacity to detect faraway stars like Icarus. Equipped with 18 mirrors in beryllium, it will be operational six months after its launch. It will be able to look far back in time and capture light from Population III stars, like the 13.5 billion-year-old star, composed exclusively of hydrogen, helium, and a dusting of lithium.

Gravity shows its power of attraction when matter is able to cluster. Gravitational lensing occurs when gravity causes the light to bend. Gravitational waves ripple when gravity travels at the speed of light. Gravity is not the same everywhere and depends on one’s location. The astronauts on the moon would feel just about one-sixth of the level of gravity on Earth. Are spacetime and gravity intertwined? Since the emergence of gravity does not derive from the properties of the underlying microscopic “universe,” what precedes gravity is a quantum gravity that may be of a holographic nature. Holographic projection acts as a translation tool enabling information to be stored and passed on to another set of dimensions. Holographic models for the very early Universe may explain the data embedded in the cosmic microwave background and are competitive to the standard model of Big Bang cosmology.

As I dissect every word, I struggle to wrap my mind around the idea that space emerges together with gravity. I imagine the Universe as a multi-dimensional race track where we observers are at the finish line. And all the planets and stars are racing to send us a signal. Some, faster than others, reach our consciousness.

If I have to take along with me on this new journey one post out of those written in French, it would be the one relating to poetic reasoning. Creativity drinks from the source of the flow that runs through one’s body, heart, and mind. It pushes the door to the unknown and draws from the abyss what is about to become. Consciousness wonders about the extent of its ignorance and dares to dive into the rift between imagination and reality. From the edge of the precipice, Poetry whispers a wind of freedom, transcending rules and conventions. Turning ideas upside down, dreams are the stuff that stars are made of.  While imagination builds new connections deep in the black holes of one’s own brain, consciousness watches their arising on the horizon. From a nebulous point across a synapse, consciousness is born.

What are those sounds coming from multiple locations in the Universe? The Fast Radio Bursts produce a wide range of frequencies. The latest series emerged as repeated signals and were detected this past summer by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment. That is what the word “emergence” makes me think of:  a sound rushing through space from billions of light-years away as if it were a signal transmitted with the only purpose of being received. As Rosetta landed on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko over two years ago, I wonder whether it captured those sounds in its slumber. These are the images that fill my dreams.

Over centuries, the mind has reinterpreted concepts, going around in circles. “Cosmic consciousness” is a term used by the British poet Edward Carpenter as well as the Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke at the turn of the 20th century that I am revisiting today. The reserves that I have about the reference to the divine unless it “is the collective spirit of man” should not imply the denial of such a concept. It does feel weirdly familiar to read about Edward Carpenter and his definition of cosmic consciousness as “the awareness of this interconnectedness of all people and matter existing in the past, present and future”.  Looking back, what I had set for myself as a goal 8 years ago slowly became a quest for cosmic consciousness at the crossroads of science and philosophy.

Consciousness expresses a more holistic view of the Universe. If we draw a comparison between galaxy networks and neuronal networks as Franco Vazza and Francesco Izzo do and search for proof of a stellar volition as Gregory Matloff does, how does the theory of emergence fit in all of this? Emergence suggests how macroscopic properties emerge from microscopic interactions and arrangements.  While we view the universe as a whole - a unitary system -  it is in the details, in the complexity of the interactions compartmentalized in an infinity of structures and at an infinity of spatiotemporal levels that lies the difficulty of its observation. The expansion of the universe seems concomitant with the increase of its complexity. The complexity lies in the chaotic interweaving of networks and the complexification of behaviors observed in the past and in the ever-evolving form of the future. Because of a principle of universality, very different systems, be in math, physics, and biology, that share certain fundamental characteristics behave in the same way when they reach a transition stage. From these complex systems emerges a new dynamic that does not derive from the properties of their constitutive elements.  In the back of my mind, I imagine “emergence” playing a role in structures such as the Monster group.

Living beings are highly structured systems that are maintained and reproduced through a plethora of activities aimed at self-organization, the innate property of complex systems. Stuart Kauffman,  notably, in his 2016 book Humanity in a creative universe mentioned neurodynamics involved in the critical instability of neural networks :

In his paper co-written in 2017 with Hans J.H. Geesink entitled “Consciousness in the Universe is Scale Invariant and Implies an Event Horizon of the Human Brain”, Dirk Meijer whose interest in the subject came in his later years talked about  a neural workspace “conceived as a nested organization of biophysical sites on the micro- to macro-levels of the brain. Within this workspace, a bicyclic flow of information was envisioned, of which the deep vertical aspect is related to a flux from sub-atomic particles up to atoms, molecules, cellular organelles, neurons, to neuronal networks. This process acts in concert with a second, lateral horizontal, flux in the brain, in which non-local quantum entanglement as well as holographic projection may play a role. This double rotational (toroidal) information flow may explain neural binding and instantaneous connections with other parts of the body. Both types of information flow provide the basis for integration of active information that returns to itself (a modality of self-consciousness), including modalities of universal consciousness”.  The concept of a workspace model of consciousness was proposed by Bernard Baars in 1982 and has been discussed notably by Stanislas Dehaene and Lionel Naccache.

Is there an electromagnetic field in the brain and is that consciousness? Since it is the heart that precedes the brain in the development of an embryo, must we infer that consciousness came later as a by-product of the interaction between the nervous and cardiovascular systems? Although a two-way dialogue exists between the heart and the brain, “the heart sends more neural traffic to the brain than the brain sends to the heart” .  In a 2008 paper entitled “Global workspace model of consciousness and its electromagnetic correlates” by  Ravi Prakash, Om Prakash, Shashi Prakash, Priyadarshi Abhishek, and Sachin Gandotra, it was rightly noticed that “consciousness has been viewed from different frames of references, which has resulted in the production of different theories. But a closer look at these various theories reveals the fact that there are many similarities among them. It will be more yielding if these theories are used in connection with each other for covering the wider aspects of consciousness”. That is where the contribution made by Dirk Meijer comes into play.

Under the spell of gravity, the magnetic fields of my heart and mind are woven into the fabric of space and time. As I let my mind wander while reading about Venus, I wonder about the evolutionary nature of consciousness at the time when Venus was the first planet of the solar system to be habitable from about 3 billion to 1 billion years ago. Did those life forms involuntarily escape their demise, blasted into space or could there still be microbial life forms in the dark streaks of Venus clouds?  As I ride the dragon of my dreams, my chaotic writing is dependent on the time and space I am embedded in, a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. The degree of disorder wrecking my mind varies with my own struggles between existential agony and exuberant desire for freedom.

As we envision the possibility of a human mission to Mars in a not-so-distant future, we are waiting on the spacecraft InSight to send out all the data on the planet's vital signs after its landing on November 26th of last year. ESA's Mars Express captured its amazing bird's-eye view throughout its fifteen-year history. Our mind allows us to identify with a spacecraft or an asteroid as if we were out there making discoveries. Over the next 20 months, data will pour in from New Horizons' flyby of Ultima Thule, the furthest object in the Kuiper belt to be visited beyond the known world. Ultima Thule in the infinite darkness reminds me of a floating body whose hippocampal place cells act as a sensor in the depths of space. Would its body feel the Universe expansion through the pulling of dark energy? We find a sense of belonging in knowing that the Kuiper belt, in many ways similar to the asteroid belt, is not specific to our solar system but a feature that can be observed in other stellar systems.

Against the backdrop of rigorous mathematical equations stands the poetry of metaphors. Terms like flashes, butterfly effect,  cosmic censorship, and moonshine are first and foremost metaphors that a larger audience is thankful to have to catch a glimpse of what lies beyond our earthly life. Hypotheses are meant to be proved or disproved. They continue to resonate and leave behind a trail of academic papers. The cosmic censorship was formulated by Roger Penrose to assert that “one cannot see the singularity itself from outside. In particular, it implies that there is some region that cannot send signals to external infinity.” (The Nature of Space and Time,  p.29, Princeton University Press, 2010)

“Beyond” is one of those words that just wants you to push the door to the unknown and take a mental or visual peek at what is beyond. Could time and consciousness really be the same? I ask. Consciousness defines a continuous flow. Even when, in the present moment, our mind stops wandering between the past and the future, our heartbeats, our lungs breathe the air in and out, and our ears hear sounds of motion that are evidence of the existence of consciousness and the passing of time. Some might say that time is an illusion. We wonder then if it is because of our deluded brain or whether we have not yet reached a level of understanding sufficient to see our Universe as it really is. As far as we can remember, humans have been wondering about a time before time. Some say that time existed before the Big Bang and that it hardly was a beginning, just a rebound. Time preceded time.

In a 2015 paper on Holographic Consequences of a No Transmission Principle (NTP), Netta Engelhardt and Gary T. Horowitz stated that it is because of the NTP that holographic quantum gravity generally forbids bounces through cosmological singularities. So how do black holes behave? For different black holes, there are different interpretations and different theories. Does singularity extend to infinity? And if the holographic principle is applied to black holes - meaning that the information is embedded onto the edge - is it compatible with the idea of a white hole?

In a 2016 paper on Charge diffusion and the butterfly effect in the striped holographic matter, Andrew Lucas and Julia Steinberg stated that several recent works have pointed out that the holographic interpretation of the butterfly effect is a geometric shock wave propagating along the horizon and that black holes could be maximally extended to “double-sided” geometries, which contain two copies of the field theory, where time runs in opposite directions, along with a black hole and a white hole. Within the supersymmetric spectrum of a black hole, matter and force intertwine. Are string-like waves called branes traveling in a solitary manner through wormholes from a black hole to a white hole? Why do black holes have entropy anyway?

And why was entropy low in the past? In Carlo Rovelli’s description of time’s arrow as perspectival, he explains that the reason why we experience time the way we do is a so-called “coarse-graining effect” that I understand as the uncertainty that we face as observers when we attempt to measure the actual value of past and future events. The question of time touches upon our role as observers.

Consciousness spreading upward and downward, backward and forward in time relies on the nature of numbers and their importance to understanding the Universe through conscious and unconscious quantification of our surroundings. How many dimensions are there anyway? The classification of the finite simple groups is a unique mathematical theorem that describes what all the finite simple groups look like. The 26 sporadic groups are finite simple groups unrelated to the infinite families, the Monster group being the largest. The way I understand it is that the members of the Monster group create a symmetry group of some structure that repeats itself with 196 883 dimensions. In my mind, I have the image of every footstep I took, every distance traveled in the air, on the sea, underground, and around the globe since birth; retracing them would form a web-like monster life structure with real-life events that I imagine could be mathematically described as spacetime points. According to the Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber theory, “the world is made of flashes (events in spacetime), and the wave function serves as the tool to generate the ‘law of evolution’ for the flashes.”

Is every step I make part of an already-defined course of events or a random balancing act between non-locality and causality? In our empirical inquiry into the nature of matter, there seems to be no place to study consciousness and time. Why can we physically touch neither consciousness nor time, but still, we feel them both through our body and mind? “If no one asks me, I know: If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not” (The confessions of Saint-Augustine, translated by Edward Pusey). Within the realm of perceptions stands the mystery of time and consciousness. I found it interesting that scientists rely on reason and empirical evidence but still follow their intuition in their quest for answers. Netta Engelhardt and Gary T. Horowitz mentioned that the principle they employ is intuitive. What does that mean when scientists say “this or that agrees with intuition”? Theorists and artists alike pursue an ideal truth. There is indeed an intangible line between truth and reality. A truth that is proved and demonstrated through empirical experimentation becomes part of reality. In the long and complex process that leads to uncovering new realities, those who wish to harness the power of their imagination are engaged in a dialogue on a rocky path.

In theory the definition of a physical Universe as “empirically accessible in principle”  does not preclude any future observation, dependent upon the technological advance of measurement-device techniques, of interstellar objects such as Oumuamua. The information carried by Oumuamua has now become an observational evidence, a window into what lies beyond our solar system.  Given the approximated number density of interstellar objects within the Earth orbit, one wonders why Oumuamua and not any other object was the first to be spotted. Its elongated, or maybe flat oval, shape reminds me the story of the “long white cloud” named Aotearoao that was revealed to the great Maori seaferers above the location of New-Zealand shores. 

What is the underlying reality that quantum states represent knowledge about? Maybe time, as we experience it in multifold ways through conscious and unconscious forms, “varies along with the distribution of matter”.

Stuart Kauffman talks about the two concepts of res potentia and res extensa.  Werner Heisenberg pointed out that the old concept of (res) potentia “introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality”. Res extensa originally would refer to what Descartes called substance corporelle (corporeal substance) which I would understand as the manifestation of the thing itself.