Consciousness and the Universe

 In the midst of over one hundred plant species, the last brown-eyed susans grow at the foot of the dying cherry tree near the pond. Time is all about our own perceptions. Although we can’t hold on to it, the past stays with us in the form of a conversation, a wrinkle, a memory that does not cease to exist as the next instant appears. Multiple flows into the flow of time are turbulent waters, sounds of strings. Time is an invisible luggage that gets heavier with memories and footprints. Perceptions and feelings merge in my head. Whether we are conscious of them, those “little perceptions” are traces of time.

The elusive quality of timelessness creates in my mind the image of a time void in which countless subjective experiences of time arise. If time is a process, is there an outcome? A process is a function that maps the state of a system at a given time to the state at a future time. We can think of the state in the past as a 'preparation' and the one in the future as the outcome of a 'measurement'. If there is an outcome, could we determine what it will be if we grasp all the nuts and bolts involved in the process? The gaps in our mind mirror the gaps in time between present and future, between what is unseen and what is visible.

Functionalism may be the underlying reason why spacetime emerges from the fundamental non-spatiotemporal structures of the quantum Universe. Particles in a quantum state are delocalized and entangled during superposition. What drives the dynamic localization that results in the collapse of the wave function, and why would it be consciousness anyway? The wave function per se is a universal instrument of knowledge, transcending between any two scales, particularly between quotidian world and cosmological scales of the theoretical physics. Let us say that we zoom out from the Earth, aren’t the simultaneity of physical flows and the temporal synchrony of macroscopic events similar from above to a bundle of superposition states?

In a chapter on the Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion, Henri Bergson wrote that "what is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition".  The mystery lies in-between, in how an interconnected web of microscopic quantum systems leads to the emergence of macroscopic quantum processes and how collective macroscopic quantum forces play a role in the emergence of biological structure. While we study the various growth patterns exhibited by nature, we become familiar with quantum effects. Those quantum processes may be observed in biological systems such as with the laboratory-based growth of plant-like structures from inorganic materials or in the case of quantum entanglement among chlorophyll molecules.  Researchers have been working on highly macroscopic quantum states, using for example the Long-Baseline Universal Matter-Wave Interferometer. The debate on whether quantum mechanics plays a role in biological organisms has led to the finding of long-lived quantum coherence in noisy environments, such as proteins.

Time is made of loops of temporalities hanging from a single flow. Those physical and biological cyclicities are fractals of time. Fractal geometry could help contextualize and visualize transition stages, emergence phenomena, and spatiotemporal scales that split the Universe into endless segments.  Fractals represent universe-wide patterns of multiscale integration. According to the scale relativity theory, the description of the world is legitimate as a fractal fluid of free particles. It may bring into light a unitary view of matter. It is a theory of self-organization describing scale-dependent physical phenomena, in which various scales are not absolute but only relative. It means that only ratios of scales do have a physical meaning, not a scale by itself.

Fractals are considered to be "a model of time" that could potentially relate consciousness and cosmology. They are defined by the range and level as well as the upper and lower limit of self-similarity. Whether they show infinite depth within a finite area or whether they are uncomputable fractal attractors in the infinite future,  they appear to be a fundamental feature of spacetime. 

Every puzzle solved leads to more unsolved mysteries. Our mind dives into open cracks and breaches and scrambles to climb back out. Those mental cracks and breaches are our inner infinity. If the Universe did design itself, were fractals intentionally factored into the preparation stage of the process or did it happen along the way as an outcome of the design itself? I would agree with Philip Goff that the universe, although physical, acts, and only acts, through a basic capacity to recognise and respond to reasons. Causality and fractal geometry appear to account for fine-tuning. I still feel though that fractal geometry does not exclude the concept of a Universe of “wholes as ‘built up’ from parts”. Having said that it also appears to respect continuity of action, one fundamental aspect of the theory of Superdeterministism.

 My mind enjoys counting games. In the exchange between two sets of quadruple elements, I wonder whether the six spatial and temporal scales in the Human Physiome Project -- atom, protein, cell,  tissue, organ and organ system & organism -- mirror the six spatiotemporal scales in the Universe that are star, star system, galaxy, cluster, supercluster, and filament. 

In some tucked away part of my memory, there is for now a closed chapter of Buddhist studies. What if the entire socio-cultural system, including fields of religion and philosophy, was designed like a series of fractals? Even cosmic consciousness would end up being a fractal infinitely enriched by individual consciousnesses. My autobiographical self recalls that the Buddha is "at least partly a function of and dependent on his being embodied in others". The word 'embodiment ', used to describe the numerous ways to communicate the Buddhist scriptures and the Buddha's countless manifestations, reflects the fractality of Buddhist teachings. Gene Reeves writes that in the Dharma Sutra, "reality and togetherness of being both one and many are affirmed". We all are in our own way the embodiment of a collective consciousness. 

Kerri Welch, A Fractal Topology of Time: Deepening into Timelessness

Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, New Essays Concerning Human Understanding

Gene Reeves, The Stories of the Lotus Sutra & The Lotus Sutra: A Contemporary Translation of a Buddhist Classic

Leaves have started to fall off the elm tree. Autumn is settling in. Yellow and red colors are slowly taking over the green canopy and understory of the native garden. Being is only briefly real for becoming isn’t an illusion, but forever real. Time is a process. It’s like catching the wind and trying to contain it in a bird’s cage. Kerri Welch suggests that time is a subset of temporal symmetry, which in turn is a subset of timelessness, a “fundamental aspect of the Universe” . “Timelessness and temporal symmetry,” she writes, “ are distinct from time in that they do not obey the unidirectional causality of time”. They are “distinct from one another in that temporal symmetry requires that the transition between points in time proceed linearly through connected moments in time, whereas timelessness suggests a simultaneity and unification of temporal moments”. 

In another of the stories in Calvino’s Cosmicomics, the protagonist, whose name is Qfwfq, spends a long time as lowly mollusc condemned to a moment-by-moment existence, a prisoner of the eternal present. Days and nights crash over him ‘like waves, all interchangeable, identical or marked by totally fortuitous differences’. In an attempt to separate his present from all other presents, Qfwfq starts to build a shell, hoping to lay down markers in spiral accretions as if he were making his own clock. He tries to create an extremely long, unbroken shell-time, but an infinite spiral proves impossible: the shell grows and grows and at a certain point stops -- and that’s it, finished. Thousands of other molluscs try too but the effort is wasted: time refuses to last, the shells are friable, destined to crumble into pieces. Theirs are only illusions of time that last as long as the length of a tiny shell spiral, splinters of time that were detached and different from each other. Eventually, Qfwfq realizes, someone else has to try to ensure that everything that was left or buried [becomes] a sign of something else… (Caspar Henderson, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary)

Timelessness hosts the passage of time. Some may describe it as the eternal present or Nowness, a continuum of present moments at which “time touches eternity”, as C.S. Lewis said. It is the unknowable eternal Now that encompasses all the fragmented, monadological nows. It alludes to Julian Barbour’s “nows that make up all the points” on the Universe’s path where we all stand.  In opposition to timelessness in which past, present, and future aren’t closed compartments, those ephemeral nows underscore the subjective aspect of time. I felt as if I caught a glimpse of the “moving present” with the three circles of dance, and that my body could instinctively position itself in relation to it. Our understanding occurs on three levels: the mind, the heart, and the body. When we say that we have learned to spatialize time, it means that our body -- that which moves through space -- senses its place within the passage of time.

The experience of the Now is the only way for us to know that we’re alive. Paradoxically, the present is an illusion that is gone as soon as it passes. It appears as a line of demarcation on the edge of which we are ready to plunge into the unknowns of the future. Time moves nonstop from one instant to the next, and the future is already here insofar as the present has passed. In a post about process, I pointed out 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? I asked. 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 already part of the past and the next is part of the future. We might as well say that time does not exist because the present time is, all things considered, an illusion. 

What I see is four temporal dimensions: that which is, that which has passed, that which will be, and that which is always in the state of becoming. The first three are subjective. The latter is timelessness. The eternal Nowness is what we are removed from at the time of death.  It is indeed true that the Universe talks to us in so many ways, and every time we find a new way of listening, we find something else, as Ellie Zwebel is quoted to have said. Those many ways could overshadow the objective reality of physics. Time is a complex and multi-layered web of geometry intertwined with that of space. Precisely because we understand the Universe through our body,  we have learned to spatialize time and can’t separate it from space. The internal eternity of spacetime is reminiscent of Blaise Pascal’s two spatial infinities to which time-domain astrophysicists could relate.

Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty, and turn his vision from the low objects which surround him. Let him gaze on that brilliant light, set like an eternal lamp to illumine the universe; let the earth appear to him a point in comparison with the vast circle described by the sun; and let him wonder at the fact that this vast circle is itself but a very fine point in comparison with that described by the stars in their revolution round the firmament. But if our view be arrested there, let our imagination pass beyond; it will sooner exhaust the power of conception than nature that of supplying material for conception. The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God, that imagination loses itself in that thought.

Returning to himself, let man consider what he is in comparison with all existence; let him regard himself as lost in this remote corner of nature; and from the little cell in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him estimate at their true value the earth, kingdoms, cities, and himself. What is a man in the Infinite?

But to show him another prodigy equally astonishing, let him examine the most delicate things he knows. Let a mite be given him, with its minute body and parts incomparably more minute, limbs with their joints, veins in the limbs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours, vapours in the drops. Dividing these last things again, let him exhaust his powers of conception, and let the last object at which he can arrive be now that of our discourse. Perhaps he will think that here is the smallest point in nature. I will let him see therein a new abyss. I will paint for him not only the visible universe, but all that he can conceive of nature's immensity in the womb of this abridged atom. Let him see therein an infinity of universes, each of which has its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; in each earth animals, and in the last mites, in which he will find again all that the first had, finding still in these others the same thing without end and without cessation. Let him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in their vastness. For who will not be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect of the nothingness which we cannot reach? He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him by nature between those two abysses of the Infinite and Nothing, will tremble at the sight of these marvels; and I think that, as his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption.

For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret, he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up.

Time may be found on the edge of the quantum Universe. “Could the parallels between the flow of our subjective, felt experience and the flow of energetic quantum reality indicate something of the nature of their deeper interconnection?”  asks Kerri Welch. In the evolution of the wave function,  a physical thought -- a speck of metaphysical dust -- acts as a proto-will and interacts with us. In so doing, it triggers in ourselves the awareness of information passed on to us. We might still debate whether consciousness “causes this” or is caused by what occurs during intervals of quantum superposition before collapse.

Whether we perceive time as “flowing in one direction because it does flow in one direction” or “because our brains perceive it that way” is at the core of the intrinsic circularity spoken about by Paavo Pylkkänen. As consciousness emerges, it appears to cause in ourselves the impression of time asymmetry. The collapse may be independent of how we experience it. “In the same way that entropy may be a subset of a larger temporal reality, our subjective experience may too describe only a portion of a larger reality” adds Kerri Welch.

I have talked in the past about the possibility that our future influences the way the present unfolds, that the increasingly complex reality of the future is somehow compactified in the simpler reality of the past and that in the future lies an attractor that pulls the essence of reality within the expanding Universe.  Kerri Welch suggests that the quantum information incorporated from the future could be the “hidden variable”.  Such a view would support a deterministic theory of everything. She points out that backwards time may be hiding in plain sight. One particle could oscillate “between backwards and forwards time” appearing as particle and antiparticle at the same time. They may therefore occur “simultaneously” rather than being mutually exclusive. The Universe may allow “overlapping”. 

Having said that, I have brought up other scenarios involving time-reversal. I  have pictured in my mind the negative-energy particles of the dark sector traveling backwards from the future somehow meeting at the intersection of past and future those positive-energy particles traveling forward in time as if they both were traveling the same distance in their determination to meet. That is how I see a cosmic coincidence unfolding. It was also suggested that antimatter goes backwards in time. In his latest paper, Salvador José Robles-Pérez proposes that the most natural way in which universes can be created is in pairs of universes whose time flow is reversely related. Internal inhabitants of a universe-antiuniverse pair could identify matter with the particles that move in their spacetimes and antimatter with the particles that move in the time reversely symmetric universe.

The mind circulates in a space-time continuum while the body remains anchored here and now. Timelessness rules over the “interior dimensions” of memory and imagination which involve all of the possibles “outside of space but inside of time” -- as Stuart Kauffman formulates it. While imagination builds new connections,  memories rise to the surface before sinking once more into the mnemonic chaos of the Unconscious. We could argue that we need both perspectives from past and future to face the present. In those extra dimensions outside space but inside of time, they play an active role in the way time goes backwards and forwards right under our noses. Although memory travels backwards, vivid moments are fading away because aspects of past information are somehow “inaccessible in the present”. 

Imagination is the mind’s way to travel forwards. What if dreams were a resonance structure in which information from future were passed to present? Dreams unfold like a dialogue and maintain a precarious balance between the deep waters of the Unconscious unaffected by the passage of time and our consciousness, between infinite possibilities stored away in parallel worlds and the reality in which we live. Could our ability to experience time-reversal be trapped in our Unconscious? Are premonitions “an effect of reverse causality or of tapping into a timeless knowledge”? As we evolve and become increasingly aware, we may “detect the subtleties of reverse causality, similar to the way we have evolved into our current understanding of time”. 

Consciousness walks the roads of the future and the trails of the past. Our brain is a time machine. We do not have full access to past and future because of the “symbolic language” of our Unconscious.  Faded images and buried feelings may be all what is left of a time 50,000 years ago when the first humans migrated to the Eurasian continent as far as Australia and dispersed along the coast or when the first plants, before the time of hominids, integrated the capacity for photosynthesis more than 2.6 billion years ago. 

In the pitch-dark early morning, I heard the call and screech of an owl for the first time in a long time.  She sounds like a barred owl. Her call tearing the silence of the night is said to herald a time of spiritual balance and to be a sign that the cosmos is moving towards equilibrium. In the end, our free will and ability to express ourselves may be limited. Although there is ‘order’ in how the Universe appears before our eyes, I still see it as a clueless thing that reveals itself by expressing itself.  The nature of that order, though, may be deterministic. No doubt I’ll return to the subject of time when Julian Barbour’s new book The Janus Point is out next month.

Kerri Welch, A fractal topology of time: Deepening into Timelessness

Robert Lanza, Beyond Biocentrism

Julian Barbour, The End of Time

Dean Buonomano, Your brain is a time machine

Stuart Kauffman, Humanity in a Creative Universe

We sometimes feel that we have reached an impasse and need a breath of fresh air to keep going. Words are powerless without a final resolution. Our heart measures time; our brain harbors consciousness, and our body moves through space. Weighted down by the material universe, we think of time and consciousness unworthy of our immediate concern. David Bohm might agree with Samuel Alexander on the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of an artist’s creativity. In our attempt to explain any creative process, we have come to understand that the train of thoughts and the flow of words as well as their association with each other influence the way any subject is discussed or pursued to a more or less unpredictable outcome.

That which feels, where is it? There is no consensus on the level at which consciousness appears. It may be the result of classical, chemical, and electrical interactions between neurons or arise within cellular structures inside neurons via quantum coherence or even a combination of both.  A model that would establish a relation between states of experience and the quantum universe stems from the fact that there appear to be resemblances between quantum processes and thought processes. In particular, microtubules that are found in almost all eukaryotes and some prokaryotes have been suggested to play an essential role by Penrose and Hameroff. It is often argued that consciousness is limited to large brains and a few living species because only when an animal possesses enough microtubules (or a large enough brain) could it give rise to consciousness in a relatively short and realizable period of time. Among the most recent undertakings, a Functional Modeling Framework proposes to define the criteria for a model of consciousness. 

The context-dependence of properties in a quantum system affects the superposition and collapse of the wave function, that is when Consciousness comes into play.  David Bohm underlined the indivisible nature of a quantum system. I understand that the collapse of one particle has an effect on the entire system. Could a model of consciousness test the relationship between the conscious experience and the behavior of a quantum system?  In the end, Paavo Pylkkänen writes in a 2014 paper,  we use the thinking process to explain the thinking process, so there is an intrinsic circularity, to begin with. If we are, psychologically, quantum-theoretical beings, he adds, then by being familiar with ourselves, we may be familiar with quantum effects.

Others hypothesize that consciousness emerges from entangled atoms within molecules in the brain or it has to do with photons and photoreceptors. Once the photon is delivered to its photoreceptor, the entangled wave function collapses, and the visual awareness starts to emerge. A ‘quantum Goldilock effect’ -- analog to the fine-tuning -- has been recently proposed, suggesting that the interplay between noise and temporal quantum correlations leads to an increase in the system’s efficiency. 

That something that feels may be a form of ‘proto-cognition’ or ‘proto-will’. I could not say whether we’re talking about panprotopsychism, panexperentialism, or micropsychism. There appear to be varieties of panpsychism that are the subject of many papers and studies today. Modeling frameworks would allow the opportunity to test them. The first step of a conscious experience is feelings. Those are ubiquitous. It is what comes next that creates an irreversible distinction in temporality. William Seager raises the possibility that there is no radical or ontological emergence but an intelligible relation that holds between ’mental components’ and the resulting aggregative state.

Could consciousness be paired with other physical forms of communication abilities? Some may defend a more standard view of the Universe for the reason of conceivability, but conceivability is a concept subject to the extent of our current knowledge. In the end, we remain unsure at what level consciousness emerges and continue to debate whether  ‘proto-cognition’ or ‘proto-will’ is real.  Could it be that it isn’t that consciousness is solely confined within our body, but that the human brain is a transmission box of communication specific to us, the human species? Other transmission models of communication include those in blue whales that have “ten times as many neurons as we do devoted to picking up sounds below 100 Hz”*. Dolphins perceive sounds with a frequency eight times higher than ours. A migrating bird with its light-sensing cells in the eye and its quantum sensor sees the Earth's magnetic field. Cephalopods represent an island of mental complexity in a sea of invertebrate animals. They have developed a large brain and adopted a complex behavior on a branch of the phylogenetic tree, separate from ours. And bees can communicate with each other, through a dance, about the location and quality of a distant food source. Human consciousness appears to be a more integrated, coherent, and unified form of subjective experience. What may be even more disconcerting to us is why some of the other minds have such a short life span. And so is our fate compared to the life of a star.

Poets are tamers of imagination. For them, the Universe is a poem and humankind, a forest of walking brains. Cosmic consciousness is a shadow trapped inside the Universe shaped like a dodecahedron with flat mirrors reflecting endlessly. The octopod-like consciousness propels its eight-fold appendages suitable for feeling and seeing to explore the cavernous empty space. While human consciousness may be a by-product in the evolution of life,  sufficiently complex networks, whether they be ecological, cosmological or even social or artificial, may have become conscious. Could there be extra physical dimensions where consciousness lies? If consciousness is a multiscale phenomenon, are multiscale emergent phenomena common in nature? Cosmic consciousness may be twofold. On the one hand it is, I believe, the inner resonance box that connects us with our surroundings. On the other hand, beyond our conscious experience and that of other organisms, forms of consciousness have emerged and integrated complex physical systems through experience-sharing, fusion, and phenomenal bonding, all of the ways that have triggered in ourselves neural plasticity. 

As I recall, astrophysicist Franco Vazza and neuroscientist Francesco Izzo attempted a comparative study between galactic networks and neural networks. Preliminary results tend to show that the human neural network and the cosmic web are remarkably similar. According to the Integrated Information Theory,  a system is conscious only to the extent that its parts act in a seemingly indivisible and unified way. As it turns out, even sand dunes can interact with each other.

My mind imagines quantum interactions leading to molecular reactions, the Earth as one physical entity, and the Universe a place where consciousness emerges at the molecular level even in stars. Swarm intelligence means the pooling of individually acquired knowledge, a sort of collective consciousness of a group, a population, the universe quite simply. Do the chains of salps swamping Antarctic waters have a mind of their own? A theory of everything, which includes a theory of consciousness, involves the study of how consciousness, spreading branches on its own phylogenic tree, evolves beyond the brain.

While most of us run out of words, poets caught in the midst of impressions, feelings, and connections imagine “ what it is like” to unveil “what is”. The ontological status of consciousness is defined as follows:  “there’s something that feels”. That ‘something’ represents that which is, regardless of whether it is unseen and intangible. What is that which is? How much consciousness is out there? How is it for that which is to feel? Is an atom’s consciousness external to the Sun’s of which it is a part? 

Without shared resonance, consciousness is confined to a single emergent layer. With shared resonance, it becomes layers upon layers of intertwined emergence. The Universe may be a composite subjectivity, formed of many individually conscious parts. How do those parts bind together? At the very least, they need to obey principles of reflexivity and transitivity.  If time is my common denominator, how to relate the experience of a star to that of a human being? 

While it appears to our mind and body that consciousness is grounded in natural science, it may be an element of the quantum Universe. A model of consciousness will need to prescribe a relation between states of experience on the one hand and the natural world or the quantum Universe, on the other.  If analogical terms and fractal representations are imaginative but reductionist to explain the Universe, how to remediate their insufficiencies? 

What it is like refers to how it is for the subject itself, whether it be the Universe as a whole or an electron. Although analogies refer to relations and similarities between aspects of experience, there is no conception that allows one to establish the identity of a ‘what it is like’ aspect of experience with a physical state. Since mathematics is considered essential to gain understanding into the Universe, could those relations be translated into a mathematical structure?  

In any scientific approach, writes Johannes Kleiner in his paper on mathematical models of consciousness, two fundamentally different methodological approaches allow one to gather information: a first-person perspective and a third-person perspective. A scientific model of consciousness addresses both. What is an act of consciousness? How does it unfold? In the case of the universal wave function, in which the Universe is as much the observer as it is the observed, the process starts during superposition and ends with collapse. What exactly happens during the intervals between events of collapse and what flows throughout these intervals might need to be taken into account in regard to the transfer of information, feeling, or consciousness. Could the idea of cosmic consciousness be addressed within a general mathematical framework?

No scientific methodology applied to date, writes Johannes Kleiner, can be used to address non-collatable aspects of experience.  A part, property, or feature of conscious experience is non-collatable if there are no reasonable means to identify this part, property, or feature over experimentation. Non-collatability implies limitations on how aspects of experience can be referenced in a theory or empirical investigation. How then do we define cosmic Consciousness that is ineffable and inaccessible? The observed is the experiencing subject. How experience reveals itself to the Universe, how it finds itself experiencing, defines cosmic consciousness. Its conscious experience constitutes the totality of feelings. 

One of the mathematical models of consciousness is the Integrated Information Theory. At the heart of the theory is an algorithm that aims to determine both the quality and quantity of a physical system’s conscious experience. It is constantly under development, with new and refined definitions being added every few years. Johannes Kleiner and Sean Tull published in a paper this year their mathematical analysis of the theory.

The idea that we can only talk about consciousness of the self and not a universal consciousness feels limiting. For me, the thinking process unfolds internally as if I were conversing with other minds around a table. It is reminiscent of a fictional dialogue cleverly written in 2014 between Medard Boss, Heidegger, Freud, Sartre, Buddha, and Jung. The quotation at the beginning of this post is part of it. Words of Josiah Royce, Thomas Nagel, and others resonate in my head. 

If there is conscious life elsewhere in the Universe, says Thomas Nagel, “it is likely that some of it will not be describable even in the most general experiential terms available to us” because there might be out there, asserts Josiah Royce, “a depth of meaning, a completeness of expression, a wealth of facts, a clearness of vision” to which we may not have access. Even so, it does not mean, observes Nagel, that “we should deny all the possibles that come from what we can never describe or understand”. It is not to say either that “such an understanding may be permanently denied to us by the limits of our nature”. 

There appears to be a difference between self-consciousness and cosmic consciousness as if we need to access one to attain the other. Not everyone reaches such a level of symbiosis with the Universe. There is a transition, claims Richard Maurice Bucke, between self-consciousness and cosmic consciousness, that is when a person who was self-conscious enters into cosmic consciousness. As a result, one feels how the Universe is “not a dead machine but a living presence” and is motivated to “take on enormously greater capacity both for learning and initiating”. Either we’ll transcend individually to a higher level of consciousness, or the day will come when the entire species will evolve. We will then understand the Universe in the most subtle way. Such a new aspect of ourselves will demonstrate an evolved behavior. But when discussing the future of humankind, we often mention how we could benefit from being artificially augmented. I would rather know what will happen to our sense of empathy, sensitivity, and intuition. Will those human traits grow in the future to help tackle the socio-economic and environmental challenges?

As time passes, an increasing number of praying mantises are spotted in the native plant garden. A friend of mine said the other day that it is a sign of a healthy ecosystem. “Whenever I want to feel humbled,” writes Thomas about the ecological collapse, “I think of the species that disappeared because of our conceit. They went away painfully, but we never saw it happen. A last male or female waited forever for a mate, and then they fell dead and unmourned after their hope was dashed”. The Moon set early last night as I, too, fell asleep at an earlier time than usual, exhausted by the burning magma of thoughts in my head. 

Moving forward, I’d like to restate the following points: The code in the hidden order of time converts information into rounds of communication between Consciousness and the Universe. No matter which fundamentals of reality take part in the circle of concepts and whether some are co-emergent,  I intuitively feel that time comes first.  I remain cautious, though, keeping in mind that I ought to go deeper. Writing helps with the disentangling of my thoughts. I would not know where to start without it as I continue to grasp the more profound significance of what I have so far barely touched upon. 

The deeper we go, the more our understanding grows and adds substance to the dynamic framework that we put in place. The approach is uncertain and won’t be devoid of twists and turns. ‘Transitional thoughts’ lays out a course of action that I tentatively draw for the next few posts, a path opening on the hazy horizon. I am well aware of the gap between running ideas in one’s head and testing them, and I wonder how mathematicians render a phenomenal experience into a mathematical representation.

Initially, I wanted this post to complement an earlier one on computational models of the Universe. A model of consciousness is a hypothetical theory about how conscious experience and the physical domain relate. It refers to brain function and individual consciousness. Since a dream of a final theory can only include a theory of consciousness, I thought that a paper on models of consciousness by Johannes Kleiner from the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy could be of interest in my own pledge to define the bond between the Universe and Consciousness. 

As it is often the case, I got sidetracked from my original intent. An article by David Chalmers and Kelvin McQueen will soon be published in the volume of Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness.  They plan to demonstrate how consciousness comes into play in the collapse of the wave function. “Measurement is where consciousness comes in. Measurement is when a physical system affects a conscious observer”. In a video chat with Robert Wright, four years ago, David Chalmers suggested that whenever the wave function collapses, that is when consciousness kicks in. Without it, there is no consciousness. 

David Chalmers and Kelvin McQueen intend on spelling out, in mathematical terms, how consciousness exerts a causal effect on the dynamics of the wave function. “Consciousness never enters a superposition. It is always in a definite state. The collapse defines the definite state of consciousness”. In my mind, quantum fluctuations are at the steering wheel of virtual particles. Could a process of appropriation occur during the superposition state leading to the collapse of the wave function? When we speak of quantum ontology, we mean that at the base of quantum mechanics lies the possibility that a wave similar to a physical thought or a speck of metaphysical dust operates a particle of matter mentally, giving it shape and guiding its movement by the transmission of information.  

A larger problem at hand is how the wave function applies to the entire Universe. The concept of universal wave function entails that the Universe as a whole is both the observer and the observable. All the actors and players within the Universe are only bearers of their own perspective. We could look at the entire Universe as the setting of an infinite number of superposed states that collapse and emerge in the quantum universe. The cosmic microwave background could be seen as the collapse of a universal wavefunction. It is as much a holographic projection of the data-embedded early universe as it is a snapshot of a universal form of consciousness. 

From the perspective of bottom-up panpsychism, “the moment any physical system potentially becomes entangled with consciousness, it too will have to go into a definite state,” concedes David Chalmers. If consciousness only occurs at the time of the collapse, it would imply that a shared resonance from micro-conscious to macro-conscious entities could only be limited in time, at best intermittent. The definite state constitutes a self-recognition of such an event. But what the collapse signals is that a transfer of information, feeling, or consciousness is finalized. In a sense, a wave-particle is a wave of consciousness that may be short-lived and whose only function is to combine with others.

In a time-embedded Universe, Consciousness takes the form of a silent chatter, the arousal of feelings internally vocalized. Thomas gained an understanding of what it is. “All creatures have consciousness,” he writes. “Consciousness seems like emptiness, but when it aligns with thought, it becomes magnified and fulfilled”.  His distinction between thought and consciousness is an interesting take on the wave-particle duality as if consciousness has always been there, but it is the thought of it that somehow eludes us. 

As we wish to pinpoint consciousness’ whereabouts and physically seize it,  we may ponder upon the implications of a method such as facial asana. It is based on the belief that one half of the face is reactive, and the other side is composed. “From an abstract perspective,” Thomas writes, “the reactive side is occupied by thought, which is in turn possessed by self, ego, whereas the composed side is occupied by consciousness, which is in turn detached from the mind and body. After we lose self, our thought becomes pure and spiritual - exactly like consciousness. When thought is possessed by self, it can be challenged to the point of disintegration, but it attains oneness of presence after it aligns with consciousness”. 

The idea of alignment between thought and consciousness could be seen as a state of superposition until, in a possible form of interactionism, consciousness takes over. Going back to the wave function, it may be that a physical thought, a speck of metaphysical dust, needs to interact with us in order for us to be fully conscious of it as we evidently are at the time of measurement. 

I was pleasantly surprised by the profoundly enlightening comments I received earlier this month. “We are not aware of the conflict within because ego possesses thought and we think it natural,” writes Thomas, “but after thought finds release from ego, we become stunned at finding the true characteristics of thought, and we are left dumbfounded when we realize that it is not different from consciousness.”

The garden is in complete disarray. The plants have taken over. Is it an act of will on their part?  Fall is adding colors to the landscape. Like those native plants, we can’t seem to ‘grow neatly.’ Our thoughts and actions appear messy at times. Chaos has its beauty. I am not an experienced yogi like Thomas, although I sure would need to practice some of his techniques -- like facial asana -- to allow thought and consciousness to be “aligned and become one.” In my next post, I’ll tackle mathematical models of consciousness and, while we wait for Thomas’s account in his own words, I will reflect a bit more on his experience with consciousness. But for now, I’m going to let my mind run its course through the neverending flow of thought-provoking news.

I have conveyed in the past the way I feel about the accidental nature of things. In a seemingly deterministic universe, what it comes to in the end is whether our free will and ability to express ourselves are a real thing or a false belief of those -- like me -- who can’t completely agree that it is all about the nature of knowledge, and the nature of agency and the self combining in ourselves to act and create.  I wish to read more about the role of intuition and remain in agreement with Alexander’s description of a state of cluelessness preceding an act of expression.

Surprisingly, artificial intelligence, too, can turn thoughts into words. A neural network used by a team of researchers at the Center for Integrative Neuroscience was able to encode a sentence-length sequence of neural activity into an abstract representation, and then decode this representation, word by word, into an English sentence.  Assuming that an AI can think and communicate independently, will it have free will? It leads to a fundamental question, that is how Consciousness and free will are connected. Is consciousness a prerequisite for free will? Is free will sine qua non in the definition of consciousness? Does the implementation of free will in an entity require that this entity is provided with a brain or an advanced mental system? The computational approach of a concept, such as free will, entails that it will be possible to put together this synthetic property with other synthetic properties to create artificial characters that do not presuppose a brain’s existence.

Consequently, I wonder whether my mind wandering freely could precede me being aware of it. A few months ago, I had a lucid dream of an incandescent line formed by warm underground waters breaking off a river of ice flowing to where I could not say. My eyes felt riveted on what looms beneath glaciers that defines their fleeting nature. A research article published this month brought back its memory. The study concludes that the damage feedback processes observed in the shear zones of Pine Island and Thwaites ice shelves in Western Antarctica are, in turn, accelerating further ice shelf instability and mass loss and, therefore, may constitute a precondition for disintegration.

Our restless mind has a will of its own. Leaving Earth’s river of ice, I fly off to the radiance of Serpens South magnetic rivers. Molecular clouds are strongly magnetized, and magnetic fields influence the formation of stars driven by a complex interplay of several fundamental forces, including turbulence and gravity. New observations from the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy have allowed us to measure magnetic fields at the center of our galaxy and provided us with an image of the Y-shaped structure of warm material falling toward the relatively quiet and massive black hole Sagittarius A*. 

The observations done at the European Southern Observatory in Chile have resulted in discovering another quiet but smaller black hole not far from us. At 1,000 lightyears away, it lies about 25 times closer to us than Sagittarius A*. Its mass is typical of a galactic stellar remnant black hole. Among hundreds of millions out there, the non-accreting black hole is part of a naked-eye triple system, called HR 6819, in which the black hole and one of the stars are orbiting each other. 

My mind feels like a free-floating object searching for kindred spirits among cosmic loners and travelers with their heads in the clouds. My inner camera zooms in and out, riding across lightyears to extend its mental outreach and elongate its suspended body endlessly. There appear to be many more free-floating planetary-mass objects in interstellar space like CFBDSIR 2149. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled to be launched in the mid-2020s, will survey bound exoplanets as well as planetary-mass objects not gravitationally bound.  

While we wait for the Roman Space Telescope and other next-generation space telescopes and observatories to be fully operational, we contemplate the possibility of lifeforms out there on multiple fronts. First closer to us, it was recently proposed that any phosphine gas detected in a rocky planet’s atmosphere is a promising sign of life. Its discovery in Venus’s atmosphere could originate from the presence of life unless it is the result of photochemistry or geochemistry. Second, in our search for extraterrestrial intelligence, a study has concluded that fewer than 0.04% of stellar systems have the potential of hosting advanced civilizations and that one in 1600 stars, closer than about 330 light-years, host transmitters just a few times more powerful than the strongest radar we have here on Earth. 

Unfortunately, I have found no extraterrestrial intelligent life form on my mental promenade. My mind returns to Earth, riding the fast radio bursts. They are observational phenomena whose astrophysical origin remains a mystery. Over one hundred sources have been detected so far. One of them, FRB 121102, occurs periodically. Last month, a paper predicted the source to be active from July to October. It should be active again from December to March 2021. 

Death has become a leitmotiv in my writings lately. I don’t know why. A friend of mine just passed away the same day Ruth Bader Ginsburg did. Thought is consciousness.

I gather my thoughts as I write and see more clearly what I have been trying to say that what binds Consciousness to the Universe is how every physical object feels the passing of time in the most personal and private manner. It isn’t a matter of whether the emotion of time, feelings, and consciousness exist. It is a matter of translating it. If we crack the code of time, we will solve the mystery of consciousness.

The emotion of time is the language spoken by the Universe. As death occurs, where does our consciousness that is information-driven go? Let’s pick up where we left off and tackle the information paradox in regard to us, humans. Since poets can only see the Universe through metaphors and analogies, they tell the story of life and death in black and white.  Our individual footprints fade away when death comes in a similar way as trapped quantum information would get lost with a black hole’s complete evaporation. 

The story of a black hole evolving into a white hole should be read within the context of a universe whose expansion is fueled by the buildup of information.  A black hole acts as an informational traffic hub. Does the information end up caught in a black hole’s deep interior, or is it released from a white hole whose evolution is essentially the time reverse of that of the black hole? 

I imagine how some information falling down the throat of a black hole isn’t lost, but the data is compressed, waiting to be spewed out of a white hole. For the very first time, an image was caught using the Event Horizon Telescope of a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth. This year, a picture of a black-hole powered jet was also published. A white hole, however, remains an astronomical object that has not been observed yet.  

If the Universe as a whole is subject to reversible processes, remnants of a black hole from a pre-big-bang phase may have been at the origin of a primordial white hole bursting at once in a bouncing scenario. Could there be a direct quantum tunneling from a black hole drawing in energy in one universe to a white hole spewing out energy in another?  It begs the question of whether a white hole crosses over through spacetime or from one universe to the next and whether it involves a wormhole structure between a black hole and a white hole of different mass. If white hole remnants are a constituent of dark matter, dark matter may have played a role in the Early Universe. 

A more realistic point of view would favor the possibility of the emergence of a white hole where the end of a life of a black hole occurs. A black hole could shrink to the point that it has no other way than to rebound into a white hole. Recent results in quantum gravity indicate that small-mass white holes with large interiors are produced at the end of the evaporation. The death of a black hole is a quantum phenomenon. Consequently, the birth of a white hole is in a region where quantum gravitational phenomena are strong. 

Residual matter ejects at a single pulse when a black hole disappears or perhaps even before much evaporation has taken place. The white hole hereafter vanishes as well when the rebounding matter shell emerges, leaving nothing behind.  The very nature of such an event makes it difficult to observe. If white holes are only a short window through which matter is spilled out at once, they could surreptitiously emerge inside voids from where matter would then slowly drip and spill. 

What we understand by the fact that a white hole displays a process reversed from that of a black hole is that a trail of particles entering the event horizon of a near-extremal black hole could theoretically come out of a white hole event horizon. A paper suggests that the extremal white hole appears to be the source of ultra-high-energy particles. Several scenarios still come to mind, some more wildly imaginative than others. Do white holes emit negative-energy particles?

As I stumble upon a section of Nolan & Hawthorne’s paper on teleology and backward causation, I wonder whether the theory of double causality could be at play in the back and forth between a black hole and a white hole. Could white holes spew out antimatter in a scenario in which two universes are both expanding from the point of view of their internal inhabitants, who identify matter with the particles that move in their spacetimes and antimatter with the particles that move in the time reversely symmetric universe? Can such a mechanism be looked at as a recycling device in which nothing gets lost but is being converted into particles which, in turn, are being tunneled from one universe to the next? Or could particles be traveling back from the future and mingle midway at the bottom of the “pit” with positive-energy particles traveling forward in time? 

But for now, let’s stick to a more familiar view of the arrow of time and see the “creative advance of reality”* as it is “intrinsically experiential”.  Black holes have an intrinsic dimension where particles of a wayward star are shredded by their gravitational pull and tunneled to the other side. And from the other end, quantum processes burst into macroscopic matter. What comes in and out are elements of reality. The Universe comes to know itself through them, experiencing all its potentialities. Wings of earthly feathers lift my mind as I look from above the shedding of the human body and liken the after-life to a white hole. But then white holes do not physically exist, Roger Penrose insists.

This blog is a story to be told with a beginning and a plot. Like time itself, it only goes one way, picking up ideas and thoughts left off from one post to the next. Every post adds another piece to the puzzle, another angle to the problem at hand, another brick to the house of thoughts and ideas as I try over and over again to get it right until all the pieces of the plot are assembled. 

*Alfredo Pereira Jr., Chris Nunn, Massimo Pregnolato and Greg Nixon, Consciousness and Cosmos: Building an Ontological Framework

Hampered by a cloud of confusion, my moon-like mind can’t see the forest for the trees. An inexpressible feeling hangs off the tip of my tongue, a story I can’t convey in which time, the Universe, and Consciousness are brought into play. “Look at these thousands of globes in this narrow corner of the universe, ” wrote Louis-Auguste Blanqui in 1872,  “and remember their history. A conflagration pulled them out of the bosom of death and launched them into space, as immense nebulae, the origins of a new Milky Way”(1).

 In a Universe of process, time, and evolution, what we call ‘death’ applies to events from the breakdown of an atom to the transitory stage in the evolution of stars. The history of the Universe may be a story of life and death from star-forming clouds to the extinction of dinosaurs.  It is a common feature, a natural event. Life and death intermingle. The Quintuplet cluster contains a number of red supergiants that will release upon their death vast amounts of energy heating dust and gas between other stars. The Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array has observed a star engulfing the other, fighting it out to the death. At least one in five planetary nebulae have their origin in this kind of common envelope evolution and red novae may also result.

Blanqui’s use of the term ‘death’ reminds us of how we allow ourselves to make analogies between life and cosmic events. I once imagined that, when matter falls into a black hole, it may be what death feels like to our mind and body. Since the early Universe, when two galaxies merge in a cataclysmic event, black holes in their centers coalesce. The Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors observed in May 2019 a short duration gravitational-wave signal consistent with a binary black hole merger. It happened 7 billion years ago at the same time that an enhanced star formation occurred in our own galaxy before our Sun came into being when some of the oldest grains of the Murchison meteorite were formed. 

Mergers may happen between black holes of various sizes. In the case of a smaller black hole embedded in the accretion disk of a supermassive black hole, it may unfold the same way as with the migration of a planet in a protoplanetary disk. An extensive study describes a multiple set of circumstances involving the interaction between black hole binaries and a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Models have shown that more than 70% of binaries would merge within a Hubble time via the combined action of stellar hardening and gravitational wave emission.

As I attempt to draw death on the blackboard of the Universe like a chalk shape of a jump into nothingness, death analogies pale in comparison when it comes to laying out what is actually on the other side, what occurs on the edge of a black hole, what a merger would mean to the structure of black holes. And when I struggle to imagine what ‘nothingness’ is, its implicit stillness is inconsistent with matter clearing out voids and disappearing into black holes. 

Ted Honderich writes that radical externalism is the general proposition that what it is to be perceptually conscious is for a world in a way to exist. Analogies, and in particular death analogies, are our way to express that something like a black hole resonates with us, that there exists a shared resonance that we can’t quite explain. Could the evolution of living things mirror that of stars and follow a process similar to stages of stellar lifetimes? A detour to the wealth of scriptures, commentaries, and translations in the field of Buddhism will warn us against a cognitive veil,  that is a human consciousness “that projects and superimposes false notions and presuppositions on to reality, by which we mistake our interpretations for reality itself” (2).  

Buddhism, I feel, takes us on an inward journey as opposed to a cosmic quest facing outward. Both perspectives are complementary to each other. Peace of mind and closure are necessary to lift the heavy sky that weighs like a lid and to free ourselves from the prison of our own making, so we can step out to search for answers. As we take the journey inward, we come to the following conclusions: First, in our attempt to describe what the Universe looks like, our anthropocentrism affects our ability to construct images in our head. “Any description would encourage conceptual reductionism. Some imaginings might be more accurate than others, but they remain imaginary either way”(2).  Second, our own self-experience of an act of will leads us to infer that any instance of motion, movement, and action on the part of the Universe is likewise the expression of an act of will and, therefore, an evidence-based form of consciousness. 

When our time-bound body imperceptibly feels life slipping away from it, we are faced with the fleetingness of our own individual self. We wonder what is, after all, our calling as a species. Death, in a sense, is a sign that we are part of the overall structure of the Universe, nothing more. I can’t think of anyone who could embody better our experience with the end of life than the philosopher Herbert Fingarette in his own words. But what does the Universe look like from the other shore? 

To find closure with the death of our physical body, we formulate the theory of the “release of consciousness in the form of energy”(4) and conjecture with Bernardo Kastrup that cosmic dissociation ends when death comes. And if we consider the fact that it is “the world coming to know itself through us”(5), information becomes paramount in the Universe for which we only are a conduit for knowledge. But since nobody has returned from the other side to explain how it is -- except for ghosts visiting us in our sleep -- we may take comfort in looking at life and death as a teleological causation, convinced that all things have a natural end, or telos, at which they aimed as a way, through adaptation and evolution, to keep things flow. 

The mind contains an underground source from which a stream of thought runs outward to follow its own twists and turns,  unwilling to give a direction to its path as it fully embraces sparks of discovery. Intuition is its only rule, its only discipline. 

(1) Louis-Auguste Blanqui, Eternity by the stars translated by Frank Chouraqui

(2) Dan Lusthaus, Vasubandhu/Xuanzang and the problem of consciousness

(3) Isabelle Ratié, Some hitherto unknown fragments of Utpaladeva’s Vivṛti (I): on the Buddhist controversy over the existence of other conscious streams

(4) Contzen Pereira & J Shashi Kiran Reddy, Near-Death Cases Desegregating Non-Locality/Disembodiment via Quantum Mediated Consciousness: An Extended Version of the Cell-Soul Pathway 

(5) Steven Bindeman, Death, Consciousness, and Phenomenology 

The Moon hidden beneath clouds is the way I feel sometimes. Confusion puts a heavy burden on my soul. There is an unsettling truth to the idea of cosmic consciousness being independent of ours. Human consciousness is a wrinkle in the universal eternal Now. Death is a clock ticking inside us, and before the clock strikes, we are specks in the near-infinite field of the Universe. The three circles of dance in the observable Universe are inflows and outflows of a time that prevails over ours. A black hole is a gate to where our consciousness feels left out. Time is born in a void, lost in a black hole. The Universe at the present epoch is the single ontological ultimate there is and the definitive ground of all spatiotemporally localized centres of consciousness.

Clouds of yellow, purple, and white flora bring colors to the garden from one season to the next. As I feel its tangibility, time is no longer an illusion. All matter is time-experiencing or time-involving (1). Despite being closely related, time and consciousness are discriminable entities. Beyond the apparent lack of unity in consciousness, it is through time that all matter enjoys a little bit of consciousness. The mechanisms of integration that combine forms and dissociation that tear them apart are the colors of time.  

Although time's arrow is perspectival, every physical object feels time. It is the source of their identity (2). Consciousness is a subjective experience, the way time is a perspectival phenomenon. Time asymmetry reflects in all the seemingly irreconcilable perspectives or points of view. Individuality is an illusion. Differences in forms and contents are only aspects of time. In the physical Universe, where randomness and free will are dominant principles, I see them as equally essential to consciousness's emergence and evolution.

If time is reflected in the macroscopic irreversibility, it is no more than a consequence of the microscopic irreversibility. Streams of particles within the flow of time constitute the basis for complex and dynamically evolving physical forms. As the Universe expands and electrons interact with photons,  the cosmic microwave background isn’t unlike a snapshot of some form of consciousness. The interplay between electromagnetic waves and matter involves conscious actors in each scene. Whether it is a leaf of grass or the journey work of the stars, they all are conscious states from their point of view. 

 If a cell derives its energy from the transfer of electrons from one molecule to the next, are we holobionts hosting the consciousness of microorganisms? Are we, Homo sapiens, more conscious than other hominids? Superposed layers of consciousness lie in the texture of time and space. It is not because we do not know what it feels like to be an Adélie penguin in Antarctica or “any of the first animals whose lives felt like something to them”(3) that we are not from the same evolutionary cradle that involves consciousness. That I am helpless to feel what a hummingbird feels when it sticks its head into flowers of the trumpet vine is only evidence of a spacetime boundary that separates us. If individuality is an illusion, so is the divide between us. Hindered in its free flow by an army of armors, shells, and layers,  caught in the canvas of spacetime, whispered in our deaf ears, consciousness is still coextensive with the Universe.

Writing takes me to places I do not expect. If the term ‘realist’ applies to those who believe in seen and unseen physical matter, including the many species of particles, I am one of them. And if the word ‘magical’ implies that what we see and know is not the whole story, I am a magical realist. I believe consciousness is rooted in the physical side of things and that “the distinction between physical and mental is superficial and unreal”(4). Matter and consciousness go hand in hand.

To me, cosmopsychism is a bit counterintuitive because I see the Universe through the prism of process, time, and evolution that begins with the smallest constituents. I can not conceive the Universe as an absolute. As it expands, it becomes what it is. It is difficult to think of a “cosmic conscious entity as the absolute” given that I see matter and consciousness as co-emergent. The ocean of consciousness that is the background of the ever-changing physical reality is not an absolute but the object itself of process, time, and evolution. 

 The relevant mechanisms of integration merely serve to weave small islands of sentience into bigger and bigger landmasses. Although I do not see a dual nature in the Universe the way Itay Shani describes it,  I, too, see our Universe as a sentient medium. Are there restrictions applied? Are only organic boundaries permeable to consciousness? Are there aspects of consciousness concealed? Maybe, but the fact that there is a communication breakdown between the different parts of the whole is not a sufficient reason to dismiss such a theory as ‘bottom-up panpsychism.’ 

A fundamental question is whether there is an ultimate reality and where it lies. John Wheeler’s concept of observer-participant could be viewed in a different light as a “cosmic dissociation” that happens at the level of individual living organisms. Ultimately, our framework of reality is as good as our consciousness makes it to be. As we envision increasingly more complex forms of consciousness, will our thoughts and ideas, too, have a life of their own, merging into clouds of consciousness? Will fears and emotions do the same? As we peel layer after layer of physical reality, will we reach the layer of consciousness? Could antimatter be consciousness? Could there be a wave-particle of consciousness? Could consciousness just be another state of matter? 

(1) Galen Strawson, Mental Reality

(2) Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time

(3) Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds 

(4) Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of matter

I am taking a break from the physical side of things at least for this post and the following. Writing has unraveled an unstoppable train of thoughts and ideas in a state of chaos and conflict. This blog is not a realm for certitudes. It is for doubts and backtrackings.  I have tried hard, though, to free my intuition from the weight of my reason and remain intimately convinced that there is more to our story than just our physicality. With time and in the years to come, will I find what I seek? 

I feel as if I had a bit of an awakening. My unsettling dreams can only be explained by the fact that I ask so many questions that words and concepts circle around in my sleep. I need to rest my soul and review what others have said about the mental side of things. I would define cosmic consciousness as a unified umbrella of consciousness. It is anima mundi. It is a matter of belief, a choice to carry, in oneself, the awareness of the Universe’s “mentality”.   Gustav Fechtner imagined what death feels like. Will we receive at the moment of death the “consciousness of all”?

Some would rather use the word ‘panpsychism’ instead of the term ‘consciousness’ because of the confusion with metacognition. But poets approach words from a different angle. They choose them for their musicality. My natural preference remains unchanged especially since my primary focus is the subject of “cosmic consciousness”. I would define ‘panpsychism’ like this: ‘where there’s flow, there’s a soul’. Poets give a soul to whatever they please and lean on their intuition to see the Universe. When sculptors blow the ‘breath of the Void’ into their sculptures, the stone is gifted with a soul in the palm of their hand. 

The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. 

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.

The Over-soul, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Panpsychism is multilevel and multiform. It describes a universe of proto-conscious entities.  It carries the view, Thomas Nagel writes, that “the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties, whether or not they are parts of living organisms”. The concept of “constitutive panpsychism” implies that the properties of any complex system derive from the properties of its constituents and that there are means by which properties combine with each other to form others. In doing so, they bring into the mix “totally different forms of experience”. 

Every level of consciousness from the Universe to the parts of an atom act as if they were a set of hollow nesting dolls placed inside each other: the human consciousness into the Earth’s consciousness which, itself, is part of the cosmic consciousness through the agency of the Sun, the Milky Way and so forth. In a universal landscape where the largest nesting doll is the conscious Universe, the infinite series of increasingly smaller dolls experience their own feelings. What is at stake is whether the nature of consciousness is ultimately subjective or whether its true nature is universal in the way that “drops of experience” feel the same across species and entities. 

Most of us seem to believe in a privacy agreement signed between the parts of a whole that would not allow the disclosure of species-specific experience to outsiders. Do we sadly live in a Universe where I could not tell how it feels to be a bee in a local ecosystem of redbuds and white oaks and the Moon could not tell either how I feel? The Universe would be a lonely place if the only thing that we could say is how it feels related to ourselves. In the case of humans and the Earth, shouldn’t we know how she feels? 

If constitutive panpsychism allows macroexperience to inherit causal relevance from microexperience, how do micro-conscious entities combine into a higher-level macro-consciousness? Tam Hunt and Jonathan Schooler write that synchronization, harmonization, vibrations, or simply resonance in its most general sense, seems to have an integral relationship with consciousness itself. Whether mental properties of one specific type of entities could be communicated, understood, or transmitted to another type remains an open debate, but I would imagine that there is a shared resonance and that all the conscious bits of our surroundings resonate in the depth of each and every one.

It seems that an emergence stage precedes the constitutive stage of consciousness and when “the many become one, and are increased by one”,  the constituted one takes the lead and holds the key.  Let’s say that the electron is conscious, we could imagine that the constitutive parts add greater consciousness over time. If the principle of continuity that we witness in the physical realm holds for consciousness and mirrors what happens in the mental realm, the experiential reality could be ubiquitous. 

Our inadequacies in feeling and accessing those ubiquitous throbs of experience do not allow us to comprehend how and when such a process takes place. Furthermore, it may not be that an across-the-board connection with the Universe doesn’t exist but that we paint it with the same brush we paint our own experiential reality. In the organized manifestation of the life of feelings, there is a difference of form, and also of content. A suprahuman form of consciousness could possess, Josiah Royce suggests, “a depth of meaning, a completeness of expression, a wealth of facts, a clearness of vision, a successful embodiment of purpose which, in view of the narrowness of our form of consciousness, do not belong to us”. 

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

Patrick Spät, Panpsychism, the Big Bang Argument, and the Dignity of life, Mind that Abides

Panpsychism in the New Millennium

Gustav Theodor Fechner, The Little Book of Life After Death

Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions

Josiah Royce, Selected Writings

David J. Chalmers, Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism 

Galen Strawson, Mental Reality