The following meanderings are not a denial of the world we inhabit. It is, after all, the only one we know, the only escape being death. They are to question how we see it and explain it. There are hints and whispers which suggest a change in how we see ourselves, and our relationship to all about us, is on the way.

As I sit and drink my coffee I inhabit a space and there is time. My coffee cup is solid. Yet down in quantum field world there is nothing solid It is a weird place where observation appears to effect reality. In this world of tiny things, a proton passing thru a slit, acts like a particle when the slit is being monitored but like a wave when the slit is not being monitored.  Things behave as waves and or particles?  

The quantum and relativity theories have changed how we see the subatomic world and the universe. Both theories have stood the test of time and given us much. And yet there is a problem. The quantum and relativistic worlds do not sit well together. In the quantum world time is universal and absolute. But in the relativistic word time is malleable and relative. 

Years and years of work on this problem have failed to solve it. Some professors are now proposing space/time is doomed, is not foundational. They propose space/time is an emergent property arising out of something as yet unknown.

There is something else, something of more importance to us humans in our daily lives, consciousness. Without this, there is nothing – no experience, anaesthesia. How do we become conscious of and experience anything, and what is it we are conscious of. Are we conscious of reality as it really is? All religions have their narratives, none of which can be grounded. They have to be taken on faith. Nowhere in science is there an accepted theory of consciousness. There are plenty of ideas but no testable theories, well until now. Maybe!

To back up a bit. An image of the world lands on the back of the eye. It’s a two dimensional image. The brain recreates the image in 3D and we see the world as it is, a reality independent of us, one we move about in and do things in. It all seems so obvious, unquestionable. But is it?

We used to think the world was flat, it seemed obvious. We used to think the earth was the centre of the universe. This seemed obvious too. It still does but we now know it isn’t. Maybe our experience of the external reality isn’t actually what is out there. Hmmm!

It’s beyond doubt that our eyes, ears and other sensory organs are tuned to a limited ranges of frequencies.  We know we don’t see all the waves of the electromagnetic spectrum or hear all the frequencies of sound. We don’t have the sonar system of bats or the eyes of hawks. If we had retinae sensitive to X-rays, we’d see skeletons walking about. If tuned to cosmic rays, we would not see solid things, as cosmic rays pass through all that is solid to us. 

The world we experience simply cannot be the totality of the external reality. What we experience has to be, at best, a partial human-filtered view, which hopefully shows us our bit of the world accurately. It seems to do so, doesn’t it? After all we walk about and don’t bump into things. Well, unless we’ve had a drink or two too many or some magic mushrooms.

Is our view of reality a direct perception served up, passively, to us by our sense organs? 

Electro-chemical signals arrive in the brain from our sensory organs. Our brains turn these signals into the light, darkness, sensations, people, things, movement, pain etc we experience. What we experience has depths, colour, movement, sound, smells, taste, objects and much more. It’s miraculous. It is quite extraordinary.

The in-puts to the brain are raw electro-chemical impulses. The chemicals in the neuronal synapses are just chemicals. Like the dots and dashes of morse code, these chemicals and impulses carry no meaning, no images, no sounds, in and of themselves, unless the ‘receiver’ can construct the meaning of the ‘sender’, has the tools or code to know, for example, … — … means SOS. If you don’t know morse code … — … is just noise. If you don’t know what SOS means, it’s meaningless scribbles.

The brain receives impulses which like the 0s and 1s in a computer, or the dots and dashes of morse code need recognition, understanding or something which can make sense of them, and construct what we end up seeing, hearing, tasting etc. This is not a passive process. How does the brain perform this operation?

We know, well some folk know, how a computer converts 0s and 1s into a movie, for example. We put a virtual reality headset on and, voila, we can play a game of tennis. The software engineers know the algorithms, the order of 0s and 1s, to place on the hard drive which will enable our brains to bring the game into our experience.

We do not experience the the external reality directly. We can’t. It’s not possible. The eye and the brain are not working like a camera.  We experience a movie, a hologram or whatever it is which is being constructed or imagined and projected.

To emphasise and repeat myself, the light you experience isn’t sourced out there. It arises within you via an interaction of the meaningless ‘morse code’, sent from your retinae, with the code reader within. You light up your world. To make things even more disturbing, this must be true of all we experience via ‘morse code’ arriving from all our sensory organs.  The brain and its neurones, which appear to be responsible for the movie, are part of it. What we experiment with and play in, is in it. What we know of ourselves via our sensory organs is in it too.

How can the projector of the movie be a part of the movie?  This does not make sense. Okay! I know. Major brain fart. 

What is this movie of yours made out of then? I hear you ask. How can it be made of anything, if it is just ‘imagined’, a projection of the brain, like a dream? For gods sake, the things in it are solid. Things within it can kill me. This experience is real. 

I get it.  It is as real for you as it is for me. It is the only reality I have. Yet I cannot get away from the fact that everything known via our sensory system, has to be a construction and projection. This is hard to get a feel for. It seems so wrong.  But it must be so.

Quantum physics and relativity tell us things are not as they appear below, above and beyond what our sensory organs show us. Just because our movie appears to work for us, we don’t bump into things, doesn’t mean we are seeing a piece of the reality out there accurately, as it really is. It seems obvious that we do and it must be so. But like the flat earth and the earth centric points of view, the view that we see reality accurately, as it is independently of us, is an assumption. It could be otherwise.

Put on a virtual reality headset and suit with pressure sensor etc and have a game of tennis. We can feel and see the ball as we hit it. We can feel the racquet in our hands. We can pick the ball up. It’s a ball. We can smell things and hear things, maybe not yet. The game appears incredibly real. And yet we know the ball, net, racquets etc are not really real. If we zoom in we see pixels. If we are software engineers we know this virtual reality game is all a matter of algorithms, electricity and circuits.  

Is our reality similar to a virtual reality game? Similar in the sense that the things which are real in the game, arise out of a reality which is nothing like the game, are in fact totally different. What is out there prior to our perceptions of it? We assume things are pretty much as we see them. Maybe they aren’t.   What we experience as reality could be as different to what is generating it, as a virtual reality game is to the software, electricity and circuits which give rise to it. 

When racing a car, with a virtual reality headset on, hits a wall, the wall and car are solid to each other. When we zoom in we see pixels. When we zoom in on our reality, we find molecules, atoms, particles, waves and things yet to be discovered. These could be likened to the pixels in a virtual reality game. Children brought up with virtual reality, will take their headsets off and ask, what’s the difference between virtual reality and this reality?

To side track a bit, there is even more strangeness in the inner world of thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams and aspirations? Where do these exist?

We use concept of mind to answer this question. We say we have conscious, subconscious and unconscious minds. The thoughts we are aware of we say lie in the conscious mind? Those which operate us without our awareness, which we can or may become aware of, we say lie in our subconscious minds. Those which operate totally out of awareness, we say lie in our unconscious mind. 

Has anyone ever located one of these minds? Has anyone ever experienced one, been in one and can describe it? These concepts don’t point to any definitive objective reality. They are just convenient terms, short cuts, to help us chat with each other. 

Do you know what you are going to think or feel in the next moment? Thoughts and feelings arise. I fancy an ice cream. Better not because…. And on we go. One thought setting off another. Sometimes myriads are firing off. Choices and decisions are made by the thought or idea which has the most charge. I feel like killing him or her. Up come feelings and thoughts for and against, until one alternative holds more sway. If you are lucky, have a bit of training in logic, this may operate too.

You only have to stop and watch your own inner meanderings to see that they arise on their own from goodness knows where. You aren’t going into a library of thoughts and beliefs and selecting them. You aren’t where they arise from and you have no say in what springs forth. It’s now known that decisions may be made before we are aware of deciding.  

Where is the locus of control? It seems like there is an ‘I’ sitting in our heads, somewhere behind our eyes, independent of the movie, able to act in it and control things.

This ‘I’ has thoughts and feelings. It has experiences. It makes choices and decisions. It’s in charge. It can change its thoughts, feelings beliefs etc. This is how we think it is and wish it would be this way more often. Has anyone ever located an ‘I’? Any attempt to find the ‘I’ is like looking for a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The more one looks the less and less substantial it is. Look more and at some point it isn’t.

Lets assume the ‘I’ exists. Does it have access to the source of thoughts and feelings? Does it have direct access to memory? When asked a question, does it enter a place of memory or do memories like thoughts arise or not in response to a question? When you know, you just know. When you know you know but cannot access it, what do you do? Whatever memory tricks you use, in the end, the memory either pops up or it doesn’t. 

Thoughts, feelings, hopes, beliefs and aspiration and even our sense of ‘I’ don’t exist in physical space. They aren’t physical things with shape, colour or weight. They aren’t subject to linear time.  We think we can control them, change them at will, but we have no way of getting our metaphorical hands on them. We can not locate them. We have no access to their source.  They are subjective, a matter of experience – full stop.

Much, if not pretty much all, of what we think and feel comes from past experiences. We end up with narratives and ideas about everything; concepts, stories, theories and explanations. In the present moment these come into play automatically in response to what is. They help us navigate the external world, pretty effectively. That they are from the past, implies they may not be appropriate in the present moment; and all too often they aren’t. They can bring chaos and misery.

There are rare glimmers or moments of what we might call insight and creativity ie new or original thought, not a product of the past. This is mysterious indeed.

For any thing to be experienced, known, we have to be conscious of it. Whatever consciousness is, it is foundational to our experience. Without it, we’d not experience anything. And yet we have not the slightest idea about what it is. It’s not needed to learn – computers can learn to play chess and beat the masters. Trees mother their seedlings. Does a tree know what its like to be a mother? Anyway..

Some scientists have a theory of consciousness based on what they claim it does, ie perceive, choose and have an effect. They are working on the maths. They are hoping to derive the laws of the reality we know, quantum mechanics, relativity, evolution etc from their equations of consciousness.

They are working with an idea of conscious units or agents and suggesting the entire universe is made up of networks of conscious agents which don’t exist in time and space, time and space emerge from the network. Each agent, when in relationship with another, forms another agent, and each newly formed agent can combine with other agents and form more agents and so on forever. Each agent keeps its identity. If this is so, you and I are made up of zillions of them. Each of us is an agent with some level of free choice constrained by agents that make us up and by agents we are a part of. 

Might take a few years. Here’s hoping they are right. If they are, we may not become extinct and science might make sense of what the mystics have been saying for aeons.

The main lesson for me in all of this is our ignorance. We hold beliefs about ourselves and others which lead to suffering, family feuds, wars and could lead to nuclear annihilation. We don’t know what our physical reality emerges out of. We think we perceive accurately our bit of it and we probably don’t. We haven’t worked out the issue of free will. We know next to nothing about consciousness, the very thing that allows us to experience everything.

The formal definition of a conscious agent is minimal, but networks of agents can (one can prove) create learning, memory, problem solving, intelligence, and humour.
With best wishes, Don