Why do you insist the universe is not a conscious intelligence when it gives birth to conscious intelligence? — Cicero, Roman philosopher, statesman, and lawyer
What we know
In the modern world, there are a number of popular theories about how consciousness and memory came about. One is that consciousness is created solely by electrical/biochemical impulses in the brain. For instance, in his influential book Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett dismisses the idea that consciousness could be anything but electrical/chemical impulses, and goes on “show” how consciousness is completely a matter of the development of these unconscious processes.
Unfortunately, much of the brain research going on today is based on this view, and it is hard to get a major grant unless the applicant seems to uphold it. As Ken Wilber put it, the current paradigm suggests: ““The brain itself is said to be a biomaterial information processor, explainable in scientific and objective terms, and the information it processes consists of nothing but representations of the empirical world.” In that light, Wilber went on to say that Dennett’s book,
might better have been entitled Consciousness Explained Away. In all of these approaches, the only difference, is the exact nature of the objective network through which information bits hustle in their appointed rounds of generating the illusion of consciousness.
The problem is, all such theories begin with the assumption that the electrical/chemical processes alone create consciousness—and that they can account for all our thoughts and feelings, all insights and intuitions, for the sense we have of a life trajectory or telos. But there is no proof for this theory at all; it is supported only by an act of faith by those who choose to start their exploration at this level. Looking at what we actually know, the current situation in scientific understanding is well summarized by biologist Dr. Robert Lanza:
Nothing in modern physics explains how a group of molecules in your brain create consciousness. The beauty of a sunset, the miracle of falling in love, the taste of a delicious meal—these are all mysteries to modern science. Nothing in science can explain how consciousness arose from matter. Our current model simply does not allow for consciousness, and our understanding of this most basic phenomenon of our existence is virtually nil.[1]
Looking at the science, there is no reason to make the act of faith that consciousness is solely created by electrical/biochemical firings in the brain, so this chapter will examine what this theory does and does not have to offer. Importantly, it will examine what can be learned from examining the one thing you can directly access, your own consciousness, and explore what might be learned in such an effort.
Skeptico: Examine my own consciousness? How is that relevant?
Wisdom Seeker: Look carefully at what you personally know. If you are like me, all you know is your direct experience of having thoughts, feelings, images, and sensations. You do not have any direct knowledge about how these things happen. You might have read or heard theories about it, but that is secondhand information. Further, theories change all the time, and researchers for thousands of years have continually disagreed. They disagree radically today.
So, right now, focus on what you directly know: Have you ever seen an electrical/chemical impulse in your brain? Have you ever seen such an impulse do anything? Have you ever had a direct experience of your brain creating thoughts and feelings? The idea that your brain is responsible for your thoughts and feelings is not something you know directly: It is a concept you have read or heard. It is, of course, true that we must rely on many concepts we do not personally have direct evidence for, but only if there is a consensus, and even then it is valuable to be open to discovering better ways of understanding. This is how all progress has been made in every area of knowledge.
Thought Experiment – Does everything come from the brain?
Relax and breathe deeply for a moment. Now see if you have any direct knowledge about your brain and what it is doing. Is it creating your thoughts and feelings? There are modern theories that the brain is solely responsible for these things, but do you have any direct knowledge that they are true?
Our human understanding of consciousness has changed many times, and will again, because we simply do not understand it. And the concept that the brain—all by itself—creates all thoughts and feelings will likely fall by the wayside, just like many other widely accepted “street views” that seem ridiculous to us now. (The sun travels around the earth. Disease is not caused by germs. Tobacco is safe. No meteors have ever hit the earth. The universe is contracting; no, it is static; no, it is expanding.) As Allan Wallace, a Buddhist philosopher and translator for the Dalai Lama (and who as a young man had a strong interest in science) said:
It’s absurd! Scientists have yet to explain the nature of consciousness. They have no means of objectively detecting it. They have not identified its necessary and sufficient causes. And yet, they ask us to wager everything on their belief that consciousness is solely a product of the brain.[2]
Opening to views beyond the narrow “the brain by itself creates consciousness,” one expansion involves growing evidence that the whole body is involved in sensing, experiencing, and thinking—the gut, the heart, probably much more. A further step includes research showing that consciousness is not located solely in a person’s isolated brain or body. But before we get to that, it is important to note that there is much evidence for correlations between activity in the brain and thoughts and feelings. But correlation is not causation. The brain plays a role in our thinking and experiencing, but there is no evidence that it is the sole cause of everything we think and experience. All you or I can directly know is that we are aware of having thoughts and feelings going on in our perceived experience, in our awareness. And since this is all we know directly, it is a very good starting point for understanding ourselves and exploring who we are.
To repeat, most everyone agrees there are correlations between electrical/chemical activity in the brain and our thoughts and feelings. We are dependent upon our brains for accessing thoughts and feelings (at least a lot of the time). If a brain is damaged, accessing information is often impaired. But this does not mean the brain creates thoughts and feelings all by itself. Even after many, many years of investigation, we have very little idea how thoughts and feelings happen, or how memories are stored. We know that the brain is usually a part of the process, but there is no evidence that it is all of the process.
A good image comes from Alva Noë, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Berkeley: “Trying to understand consciousness in neural terms alone is like trying to understand a car driving down the road only in terms of the engine. It’s bad philosophy masquerading as science.”[3] In other words, if one looks only at the engine of a car in order to understand its functioning, there is no way to understand how the direction of travel is being determined. Riding in a car is certainly dependent upon the engine—if the engine is malfunctioning the car will not take us where we want to go. But this does not mean that we are sitting on the engine, that it can steer the car, and it certainly does not suggest that the engine is determining the destination of travel. Perhaps, like the engine of a car, the activity of the brain is necessary but not sufficient for our thoughts, feelings, and memories.
The gap between electrical/chemical activity and thoughts
If a researcher stimulates or measures electrical or biochemical activity in a person’s brain, certain kinds of thoughts can sometimes be correlated with specific regions. But the researcher has no idea what particular thought will arise, nor does he or she have a clue as to how the thought that did arise came into existence. And certainly there is no way for a researcher to make a specific thought arise.
A researcher might say: If I stimulate this area of the brain, the person will have a tendency to have fear, or sexually-tinged thoughts, or a memory in a certain category. But the researcher will have no idea which particular thought will arise, and can do nothing to determine what it will be. In this sense, stimulating areas of the brain is like tuning a radio: If you turn to a particular channel, you can know the type of music that is usually played on that channel, but you will have no idea which song will be playing at the moment you tune in. This analogy, that the brain is like a radio receiver, has been made often. Just like a radio, if a brain is not working properly, clear signals will not come through. But this does not suggest that the brain is creating the signals. If the brain is a tuning mechanism, the signals are being created elsewhere. If so, the fundamental question becomes, where?
Just asking this question drives brain-only theorists to distraction—they want to dismiss the receiver analogy out-of-hand. But there is no scientific basis to do so. William James was far ahead of his time when, more than a hundred years ago, he stated that whether the brain “produces” thoughts or merely “transmits” them is unknown. To those who replied at the time that they could not conceive of where thoughts came from, if they were not produced by the brain, James pointed out that it is just as difficult to envision how a purely material mechanism can create thoughts: “The theory of production [that thoughts are produced solely in the brain] is therefore not a jot more simple or credible in itself than any other conceivable theory.”[4]
A modern science fiction story by Terry Bisson playfully presents this issue in a way that James would have enjoyed. A spaceship from a distant galaxy has landed on Earth and captured several humans to discover how they have been able to send radio signals. Being able to send such signals, the aliens assume, means that humans can think. The aliens have examined the captured humans carefully, and the ship commander is reporting back to the home planet.
He says about the humans they have examined: “They’re made out of meat.” His superior is incredulous, refusing to believe that raw meat can think. He asks where the brain is and what it is made of, since he knows that physical matter can’t think.
The ship commander replies: “Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” The superior back on the home planet asks, with puzzlement in his voice: “So … what does the thinking?”
The commander replies: “You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”
After a pause: “Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”[5]
This is exactly the point James is making. To argue that a brain made out of nothing but matter can produce thoughts and feelings is unbelievable, and so far has proven an unsolvable scientific mystery—which is the reason one of the leaders in consciousness studies, Professor David Chalmers, said it is “the hard problem” of consciousness—trying to understand how and why a physical person can have conscious experience at all.[6] And, to make an act of faith that consciousness is created by “meat” is as much of a stretch as believing that thoughts and feelings arise outside the material brain in ways we do not yet understand.
The brain as a reducing mechanism
Another way to think about how the brain works is that it is a reducing mechanism that filters out impressions so we can function in the everyday world. Actually, the brain must be limiting what we perceive or we would be overwhelmed with a flood of information all the time. The view that this is its main function has been championed by such luminaries as the noted philosopher Henri Bergson, author Aldous Huxley, Sir Cyril Burt (quoted in Chapter 2), and William James, and is now being supported by modern brain research such as that by Julio Martinez-Trujillo of McGill University in Montreal:
The brain doesn’t have enough capacity to process all the information that is coming into your senses. We found that there are some cells, some neurons in the prefrontal cortex, which have the ability to suppress the information that you aren’t interested in. They are like filters.[7]
So perhaps the brain’s main function is to filter out most of the information that is bombarding us all the time, otherwise we would be overwhelmed and unable to take care of ourselves. We can plan our everyday lives only because our minds dramatically limit what is let in. It has been estimated that you do not register 99.99 percent of the information that is available around you at any given moment. A significant factor is that the human mechanism developed to perceive only a very small part of the available information—we take in a limited portion of the sound spectrum, the light spectrum, and other energy waves that are around us (radio, ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves, gamma-rays, X-rays). All you normally see and experience is quite different from what other creatures take in; there is an enormous amount of information out there we humans cannot detect at all (through our normal five senses—perhaps we can and do at other levels of our consciousness).
Perhaps even more important is that each person only registers a very small portion of the information that could be detected by the senses. How do we select? How do we organize what is selected? It is an extraordinarily complex process that occurs mostly at the unconscious level. No one understands how this works, but one thing that has been discovered is that enculturation causes us to look for and take in some things and not others. Thus, we do not see the world as it is, but as we have been trained and conditioned to see it. What you see will be quite different from what other people see. What a forest-dweller in New Guinea sees and takes in will be quite different from what most of us in the modern world register. The crucial point: neither perspective is more accurate than the other; they are just different. An old Talmudic thought inspired Anaïs Nin to say it this way: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”[8]
As we go through the day, our biological urges constantly interact with our early conditioning to determine what we will take in through our senses. When you are afraid or insecure, most of what you will see “out there” in the world will have to do with danger or safety. If you are filled with sexual desire, you will mainly notice people who are sexually appealing. (Think back to a time when you entered a room in which a party was going on, and your attention was riveted on finding a potential partner. You probably did not notice the color of the floor, or even people who were not attractive to you.) And when you are hungry or thirsty, things you might eat or drink grab your attention.
This process of filtering out most of the available information happens, to a great extent, at the unconscious level. The brain is involved, but there is no reason to believe it is the only factor. Returning to the analogy that the brain is like a radio, the electronics of the radio are crucial for the signals to be received, but the signal might not originate inside the radio. It is possible the brain is creating as well as processing the signals to create consciousness, but we do not know that. There is no evidence for it. It is just as likely the signals originate elsewhere. This possibility fits all the facts as well as a brain-only theory.
Using this model, your awareness is moved from channel to channel by urges, desires, fears, and enculturations you received while growing up, and for most people most of the time it happens at an unconscious or semi-conscious level. But this process does not have to remain unconscious. You can learn to turn the dial more consciously, to tune to higher levels of yourself, to develop greater and greater levels of awareness. As you develop this capacity, you can learn to tune into channels beyond the ego self, and then learn to consciously turn the knob and switch channels to inputs from beyond the five senses. As you learn to do this, you can develop the power to choose what you will focus on, where your attention will be, and even what your identity will be (this takes a lot of practice). Eventually, you might even be able to tune into the highest levels of reality and discover that there are things going on in your consciousness beyond what is generated by the physical brain alone. Importantly, developing such abilities is precisely what many of the concentration and meditative practices of the world’s wisdom traditions have always taught.
Insofar as this theory has validity, it means we have the capacity to know and understand much more than we normally do in the everyday course of our lives. It even suggests that we have the capacity to absorb knowledge in ways beyond simply thinking with our isolated brains. One of the great brain researchers of the 20th century, Wilder Penfield, came to just this conclusion on the basis of a lifetime of study, saying that the ability to make judgments and exercise will are not in the brain, but somehow “transcendent” functions that are not reducible to physiology.[9]
Skeptico: What does that mean?
Wisdom Seeker: To me it suggests that our minds are more than just the physical brain; that there is something going on with regard to consciousness beyond the biological level; that our thoughts and feelings are connected to and intertwined with something beyond the firing of neurons. And this view aligns with all the great wisdom traditions of history. Aldous Huxley was reflecting on those traditions when he called this greater capacity “Mind at Large.” In his view, when we are focused on functioning in the world, the larger mind is mostly not being accessed, for everything is being “funneled through the reducing value of the brain and nervous system.” At such times, we are aware of only “a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness” contained in “Mind at Large.”[10] But much is possible, and could explain why saints and sages seem to access broader perspectives during mystical experience—they have temporarily removed the reducing value. And this can also happen to normal people—during a crisis, when praying or meditating, under the influence of mind-altering drugs, when caught up in passion, experiencing beauty, or during a near-death experience.
Can we study consciousness objectively?
Skeptico: I know you talked about this before, but I have to go back to an earlier question. I thought brain research, with all its new tools over the last twenty or thirty years, had cleared up most of the questions about how the brain works.
Wisdom Seeker: Some interesting things have been learned. MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) studies have revealed a great deal about correlations between the brain and thoughts and emotions. But very little progress had been made in discovering how thoughts are created or where they are located, which is the reason it is “the hard problem” of consciousness.
Skeptico: But haven’t researchers at least demonstrated that specific emotions are located in specific areas of the brain?
Wisdom Seeker: There were claims along those lines a few years ago, but as with so many other theories about how the brain works, this one is falling apart too. First, keep in mind that when a person reports having an emotion, activity in a specific area of that person’s brain might indicate it is involved, but this provides no evidence that the emotion is being caused or even initiated there. That specific area of the brain might be reacting to something caused somewhere else (in the gut, or even outside the brain). The fact that an area of the brain is involved in a process provides no evidence that the cause lies in the brain.
And devastating to the theory that specific emotions are located in specific areas of the brain is the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, professor of psychology at Northeastern University and the author of How Emotions Are Made: The New Science of the Mind and Brain. Dr. Barrett’s lab (the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory) analyzed over two hundred brain-imaging studies published over the last twenty years and found that “no brain region was dedicated to any single emotion.” Further, they discovered that every region of the brain previously associated with a particular emotion also increased its activity when other emotions were aroused. Her conclusion: Specific regions of the brain do not have “a distinct psychological purpose.” For example, fear has in the past been attributed to the amygdala, but it does not seem to be located there. “Instead, a single brain area like the amygdala participates in many different mental events, and many different brain areas are capable of producing the same outcome.”[11] Her work also corresponds to the growing evidence that when one area of the brain is injured or destroyed, other areas of the brain begin to pick up many of those functions. This is even true of the two sides for the brain which used to be considered a distinct dividing line. No more. Recent research shows that when one side of the brain is not functioning properly, in some cases the other side begins to take up those functions of the other half.
And although Dr. Barrett does not make this point, let me emphasize again that there is no evidence that emotions are created by the brain alone. This is a possibility, but only one out of several. There is no clear evidence as to how emotions arise. Although there are correlations between brain activity and emotions, the belief that emotions are caused by the brain has no scientific basis.
There is another major problem that must be dealt with in any attempt to understand consciousness through brain research alone: A brain researcher has no objective way to know what is happening in a subject’s consciousness. A researcher can view a brain scan while observing the actions of a subject, but neither of these provides direct knowledge of what the subject is thinking or feeling. A researcher can guess, but there is no objective way for a researcher to know what thoughts are going on within a person. No machine can determine what thought has occurred in a person’s consciousness. When a researcher stimulates a monkey’s brain, does the monkey have a thought? How about a dog—or a goldfish?
In all these cases, with humans or animals, there is no objective way for a researcher to know whether a thought has occurred. No one can say whether the brain impulses in a monkey’s brain recorded by an MRI indicate that a thought was created. The same is true for humans—and goldfish. An MRI does not reveal thoughts. An MRI of a human brain, just like that of a monkey’s, does not tell a researcher whether there has been a thought or feeling. The reason there seems to be a difference between monkeys and humans is that humans can communicate to the researcher what has happened. The researcher cannot know this without the report of the subject. Because we do not know how to communicate with monkeys about such things, they can’t give us a report about their thoughts and feelings, but they might be having as many as we do. Registering this fully makes vivid the crucial subjective element, the necessity of human reports, in all research about brain activity as it relates to where thoughts and feelings originate or might be located in the brain.
Skeptico: I’m really confused now. What about all those pictures of parts of the brain lighting up when a researcher does specific things?
Wisdom Seeker: Studying this kind of brain activity is far, far removed from direct knowledge of what thoughts and feelings are, or what causes them. To emphasize again, this kind of research reveals physiological correlates, not thoughts or feelings, and certainly not consciousness. The only way a researcher can know the thoughts or feelings of a person being studied is through that person’s personal, subjective report. Compounding the difficulty is that a person will have different thoughts and feelings when undergoing the same experiment a second time, and different again every time thereafter. And different subjects will have decidedly different thoughts and feelings when undergoing similar experiments. They will also use different words to describe what they have experienced, and similar words will have somewhat different meanings for each subject.
All this means that, to draw conclusions from the cumulative evidence of several brain studies, a researcher will have to make a subjective judgment about how to compare and interpret the varying subjective reports of the persons being studied. After such judgments are made, data can be organized into patterns and the process can become a bit more objective. Other researchers can then do similar experiments and compare their results to the first. But the next set of researchers will have to start with subjective reports from their subjects, and will have to make their own subjective judgments in interpreting the words they hear. Thus, in studying consciousness, everything begins with the subjective reports of those being studied and moves along through subjective decisions by the researchers about how to interpret the data they are collecting. In the end, all such research is filled with subjective interpretations and judgments.
Skeptico: Why can’t a researcher draw objective conclusions by looking at the actions of a subject while looking at a scan of that person’s brain?
Wisdom Seeker: Any time one person observes the actions of another, the one drawing conclusions must interpret what the other’s actions are conveying. The starting point for any research is the observer’s subjective view of what is happening. To understand this point you need only to remember that ten observers at an accident will report ten different things, some of them quite different from the reports of the others. Or consider what happens when two researchers look at a possible paranormal happening—one who believes such things are possible and one who does not. It is highly likely that the two researchers will report what they saw in two very different ways.
Another way to get at this is through the work of Max Velmans, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of London. Velmans points out that if the subject in an experiment were to start observing the researcher, there is no way we could objectively determine which one was being the most objective in their report. We tend to “define” a researcher as “objective” because of the role they have subjectively chosen for themselves, but there is no “objective” way to know if that person is truly being objective.[12] All observations involve an inner, subjective registering of some facts out of the many that are available, and then an ordering of the facts that were accepted into awareness. Both the taking in and ordering happen, at least in part, unconsciously. Then, after these steps, there remains the interpretation, which is always at least partly subjective.
All this brings us back to William James and his contention that there is no greater reason to believe that thoughts are produced by the brain than that they are received and organized by it. In response to those who think they have objective knowledge about how the brain works, consider James’ observation in The Will to Believe, that being convinced “that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only one more subjective opinion.”[13] In other words, the belief that you have enough hard evidence to bestow the label “objective” on your view is based on only on your subjective opinion.
Is the brain made of matter, energy, both, or neither?
Skeptico: You’ve said a lot about what we can’t know. Is there anything positive coming out of all the current explorations of consciousness?
Wisdom Seeker: One thing that is becoming increasingly clear is that there are several different levels to consider when thinking about the brain, the mind, and consciousness, and a lot of the confusion today comes from failing to take these different levels into consideration. At the outer physical level, the brain is just three pounds of meat, constructed of the same primary building blocks as everything else in the universe—over 99% carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. These atoms are billions of years old, and each has been in countless configurations through the eons, all over the universe (and will be in countless other configurations eons into the future). They are special (at least to us) because they have come together for a short time to be a part of the thinking process of human beings, one of the most marvelous and complex things the universe has ever seen (no one knows why, or how).
These atoms have come together to form neuronal cells. In fact, the average human brain is made up of 86 billion neurons, give or take a few (in my case, it has recently felt like more taking than giving has been going on). Each neuron is quite complex: each can have thousands of connections to other neurons, so there are trillions upon trillions of such connections in your brain (a typical brain has well over 100 trillion synapses—points of connection—up to 1,000 trillion by some estimates). And parts of this marvelous thing are always active—buzzing, humming, sensing and receiving, sorting and organizing—even when we are asleep. But how does all that buzzing and humming give rise to a thought or feeling; how is it all being organized, coordinated? No one has any idea.
Going back to an earlier point, if all the atoms in the Earth were collapsed to just its “solid stuff,” the whole Earth would be about the size of a bowling ball. Then what would be the size of all the material stuff in my brain? It would be much smaller than a pinhead (no jokes please). If compacted, it would be very hard to find all the physical stuff of my brain with a powerful microscope. The rest of the space in my head (and yours too) is not matter, but a swirling vortex of energy, waves, anti-matter, and who knows what else.
At a deeper level still, there is a growing understanding that no “objects” are solid matter at all, so even that compacted, miniscule sub-pinhead, is not really material stuff, but is itself interconnected fields of energy, or probability waves, or something even more mysterious. In 1938, Einstein was already saying:
Matter is where the concentration of energy is great, field where the concentration of energy small. … There is no sense in regarding matter and field as two qualities quite different from each other. We cannot imagine a definite surface separating distinctly field and matter. … What impresses our senses as matter is really a great concentration of energy into a comparatively small space. We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong.[14]
Think about that for a moment! If what we perceive as matter is simply a concentration of energy within a larger field of energy, then the brain is but a concentration of energy. It is not a physical thing, even at the deepest level; it is a concentration of energy within a larger field of energy. Crucially, Einstein emphasizes there is no “definite surface separating” the brain from the energy field in which it exists. And outside the swirling, radiating fields that make up your head are many complex and active fields all around you, and the fields inside are interacting with the fields outside all the time. With this image, you have arrived at the third level of how to understand yourself and your brain.
You can therefore consider your thinking apparatus at one level as being the physical meat of the brain, at another level as being made of up mostly of large cells called neurons, at a smaller level still as trillions tiny particles such like electrons and protons constantly moving and interacting, or at another level as having no physical substance at all, but simply being a field of energy within ever-larger fields of energy. Given this emerging picture of reality (and it is definitely the established view of modern physics), then thoughts must arise in ways far different from how it has been postulated by those who are focused on the brain as an electrical or mechanical mechanism. All these levels must be included when we try to understand how the brain works. Each has value, but focusing on one at the exclusion of the others (even those we don’t yet know about) is not the way to truth. There is, therefore, no reason to limit our understanding of who we are as human beings to one level. Instead, let us be creative and open-minded, exploring and considering all the possibilities.
Thought Experiment – Getting in touch with the energy field, and beyond
Realize that cutting edge science is telling you that your brain, far from being just physical matter, is made up of fields of energy, with everything moving at incomprehensible speeds. Then register that at another level still, science is saying your brain is made up of probability waves, with everything interacting with everything else—not only inside your head but outside as well. Holding these thoughts, consider for a moment that the range of possible information exchange open to you is potentially much vaster that you might have so far understood. Be open to the possibility that there is much more information available to you than you have assumed.
One noted scientist who developed an interesting way to think about all this was physicist David Bohm. He was a close friend of Einstein’s (Einstein at one point said he looked on Bohm as his “spiritual son”[15]), and Bohm shared Einstein’s view that the universe is not a random process. In Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Bohm presents reasons for believing there is an unseen order in which the physical world is embedded. He calls this the Implicate Order, which lies behind but constantly interacts with the Explicate Order of our everyday world. This Implicate Order, however, cannot be detected by our five senses, because it is outside their range. As mentioned earlier, our five physical senses can only detect a very small amount of the information out there. And crucially, there are many, many levels of reality and types of information beyond the electromagnetic spectrum that our senses can’t perceive at all, such as probability waves, dark energy, neutrinos, the quantum foam, the zero point field, and who knows how many other realities that lie beyond our perceptual field.
All these realms are one way to think about the Implicate Order, but even they are not a stopping point for our explorations. Bohm did not think he had understood what reality truly was—he saw his efforts as a starting point only. He did, however, develop sophisticated mathematical demonstrations for why something must be going on in other realms that affect the realm of our reality, and he made persuasive arguments for why our thoughts and feelings are interacting with this unseen Implicate Order. And for Bohm, all his work lead him inexorably back to consciousness:
I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole.[16]
Bohm’s suggestions have much potential for helping us understand who we are, how thoughts arise, and what life is about. His work (and that of many others exploring the cutting edge) is making it increasingly clear that you and I are being influenced all the time by a vast array of forces and fields surrounding us. Trillions of waves are constantly interacting with our bodies and brains all the time (sound waves, visible and ultraviolet light, radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, gamma rays, gravity waves, and much more—beyond our conscious awareness. Trillions of neutrinos are passing through my brain every second (yes, and yours too). All these forces and energies are constantly passing through and affecting the various parts of our bodies and brains in ways that no one even begins to grasp. Are they affecting our thoughts and feelings? No one knows. As Nobel Laureate physicist Max Born put it:
We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.[17]
Besides Bohm, numerous other scientists, physicians, psychologists, and philosophers are offering ways to think about how our minds are related to and interact with the broader world beyond the range of the five senses.
Karl Pribram, neurosurgeon and long-time professor at Yale and Stanford, has, over many years, developed a holonomic model of the brain, in which the brain is understood as a hologram rather than an electrical/biochemical machine. His theory, set forth most fully in his book The Form Within, and discussed more fully in the next chapter, describes how information is not stored or processed in fixed areas of the brain but is distributed throughout the brain (in the way a hologram exists as a semi-transparent three-dimensional image). A number of researchers have added to Pribram’s work, suggesting that (as more and more recent evidence suggests) the world outside the brain is also a hologram, and the two holograms are very likely interacting with each other in ways than previous theories have not taken into account.
Michio Kaku is the Henry Semat Professor in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York. He is one of the leading theorists of string theory and the author of several best-selling books on physics and the implications of how the emerging ideas in science affect our thinking about life and the nature of the universe. (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny, and The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything.) Along with many other scientists, he has come to the conclusion that there is a dimension of reality beyond the random and strictly mechanistic world of materialism. He summarizes: “To me it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance.”[18]
Brian Swimme, whose doctorate was in mathematics and whose life work involves the study of evolutionary cosmology, has numerous books and TV programs about understanding life and the universe within a larger picture. Journey of the Universe and the newly revised Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story expand on David Bohm’s idea that nothing we perceive as physical reality is solid matter, but is make up of infinitesimally small particles or waves that are constantly being absorbed into and then “foaming forth” from the quantum vacuum—thousands of times a second (much faster, actually).
Crucially, in this quantum realm time and space do not exist, so information can be exchanged in ways far beyond our understanding. And keep in mind that everything, including your mind and body, is composed of stuff that is continually being absorbed into and foaming forth from this background world, which Swimme calls the “all-nourishing abyss,” for it gives rise to everything and yet is unfathomable to us. But through it, each of us is deeply connected to all things. A fascinating possibility is that this unperceived realm is exactly the mysterious realm of dark matter and dark energy, about which we know almost nothing, but seems to make up about 95% of the universe. Come to think of it, how can our current theories about existence, matter, consciousness, or anything else explain anything until we can account for how we might be interacting with the 95% of the universe about which we know so little.
Dean Radin received advanced degrees in electrical engineering and educational psychology, worked as a researcher at Bell Labs, GTE Laboratories, and Princeton, and then became the Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. In several books such as Entangled Minds and The Conscious Universe, as well as numerous studies and articles, he presents the current theory that previously entangled particles can communicate over vast distances almost instantaneously (which Einstein disliked intensely but which has become the prevailing view in physics today). Radin goes on to provides much evidence that our minds are interconnected through this mysterious mechanism in ways that provide us with information going far beyond communication just limited to our five senses, which has dramatic consequences for understanding consciousness itself.
I will expand on some of these fascinating theories and ideas more in Chapter 12, and include others such as Carl Jung, best-selling philosopher Ken Wilber, noted stem-cell biologist Robert Lanza, acclaimed systems theorist Ervin László, noted Bernardo Kastrup (who holds a PhD in both computer engineering and philosophy), Alexander Wendt (one of the leaders in the development of the new field of quantum social science), and Arthur M. Young, famous inventor, helicopter pioneer, cosmologist, philosopher, astrologer, and author.
The above theorists do not agree with each other about everything (although there is much convergence between them), but they are unified in presenting interesting ideas that go beyond materialism and make an effort to include consciousness in an understanding of who we human beings might be.
But my intention here is not to settle on one definitive view among many fascinating possibilities, nor is it to reject all the important things we are learning about the brain’s electrical/biochemical processes in more traditional research. That, too, has great value. My interest here is to make vivid that, if we are to come to a full and true understanding of who we are and what life is about, we must understand the limitations of narrow, mechanistic approaches. Such views have their role to play, but are not the final story—not by a long shot.
Besides the fact that they will almost certainly be changed in the future, we should listen to the words of another Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Werner Heisenberg, who said: “The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.”[19] So, my intent here is simply to point to the vast range of new, creative ways of thinking that are emerging as the old paradigms crumble.
Skeptico: But that is frustrating. Tell me what your conclusions are.
Wisdom Seeker: I don’t have a final picture to give you. But one thing I know is that allowing ourselves to explore the broadest possibilities will bring us closer to a true understanding than if we limit ourselves to narrow, reductionist thinking. By exploring the work and ideas of scholars, scientists, physicians, and psychologists such as those mentioned above, we will begin to develop a more wholistic understanding of the nature of existence, of consciousness, and of our own identity. The great minds of human history did not achieve their remarkable insights and discoveries by thinking small. Let us join them in considering the broadest horizons in our efforts to find the best way to understand who we are and what life is about.
Is everything connected?
An important possibility arising from the thought of the creative explorers mentioned above, and many others as well, is that, at the most fundamental level, all things are part of one single field—are a part of one, interconnected whole. Almost a hundred years ago, the great mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said in his book Process and Reality that we, along with all other things, cannot best be understood as material objects, but as processes; we are more like whirlpools in a stream than isolated monads. An image is to think of everything that exists as part of a great river, with everything connected and flowing as that one river. Then, objects are temporary collections that have come together for a time as whirlpools, but retain their connection to everything else in the river. Add to this model that everything is continuously entangled in some way with everything else at the quantum level, and the possibility emerges that—just as particles are connected over vast stretches of space and can communicate instantly no matter the distance between them—perhaps our minds are entangled with other minds and can communicate in similar ways that we do not yet understand.
In sum, developments in physics and other studies suggest that information and energy are shared constantly throughout all the fields within which we exist, and we as individuals are not separate from this sharing of information and energy. At the most fundamental level, this sharing and exchange is who and what we are. Perhaps the new paradigm will be as Ervin Laszlo (discussed in Chapter 12) describes it:
We are beginning to see the entire universe as a holographically interlinked network of energy and information, organically whole and self-referential at all scales of its existence. We, and all things in the universe, are non-locally connected with each other and with all other things in ways that are unfettered by the hitherto known limitations of space and time.[20]
David Bohm’s work points in just this direction. The Implicate Order he posits is outside space and time, and is totally interconnected. Further, it underlies and gives rise to the everyday world, to the Explicate Order—is constantly and continually giving it shape and form. This idea points back to Immanuel Kant’s profound insight more than 200 years ago that space and time are not real things—not “out there” in some external world—but are constructs of the human mind. According to Kant, the concepts “space” and “time” are simply ways we organize our thinking so we can function in the daily world. Further, for Kant, behind this everyday reality is the “numinous” realm, which exists in a separate domain but can affect our normal reality. (Kant, though, unlike a number of modern thinkers, believed we could never know or perceive this numinous realm).
To me, this overlap of views between a great philosopher writing 200 years ago (without the tools of modern science) and several outstanding modern physicists and thinkers is confirming of many of the emerging ideas about existence, consciousness, and who we are.
And far earlier than Kant, there are powerful antecedents for the ideas I have been outlining here. All the great wisdom traditions speak of the interconnectedness of all things, and of a dimension of reality behind the physical—whether it be called the numinous, the Tao, Great Spirit, Brahman, Nirvana, or God. Interconnectedness is central to all the traditions, as exemplified by the ancient Buddhist and Hindu image of the Net of Gems, in which the universe is seen as a vast net—with a jewel located at each intersection. Because every jewel is highly reflective, each reflects all the others around it. Further, each jewel reflects the reflections on the jewels close by, so every jewel contains a trace of every other jewel in the whole net, symbolizing the infinite interconnection of all things. In Buddhism, this idea is further developed in the teaching of no-self, or emptiness, based on the realization that there is no such thing as a separate self, for each person is an intricate and inseparable part of the whole.
This interconnectedness is certainly present in Christianity, with Jesus saying, “I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you,” an image of a unitary, shared reality and being. St. Paul reinforces this understanding, suggesting that there is one great consciousness, the mind of Christ, which we each have the opportunity to share in: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”
I could, of course, provide quotes from every other tradition. For instance, the Sufi poet Rumi says, in his poem “Admit It and Change Everything”:
You say you see my mouth, ears, eyes, nose—they are not mine.
I am the life of life.
I am that cat, this stone,
No one.
But this is once again getting ahead of the story. Going back to consciousness, many spiritual teachers have suggested that one way to think about the reality lying behind the everyday world of appearances is that it can best be thought of as consciousness itself, or as others have named it, Cosmic Consciousness. Many scientists have voiced opinions resonant with this possibility, several of whom I have already mentioned. Other voices that can be added to that chorus are John von Neumann (a leading mathematician and physicist, sometimes called the last representative of the great mathematicians), and John Wheeler, one of the greatest physicists of the last few decades. Both came to the conclusion that consciousness, from the point of view of modern physics, is necessary for matter to exist at all, because consciousness is necessary to collapse the wave function and turn possibility waves into that which we can measure as matter. Thus, in their view, consciousness must exist before matter as we know it can exist.
Skeptico: I have to say that all this is pretty frustrating. What have we learned in recent times about where thoughts come from, and about consciousness?
Wisdom Seeker: Let me remind you of something I said before: The human species has been pondering the mysteries of consciousness for thousands of years, and no one has been able to pin it down or give a widely accepted explanation in all that time. Yet, in the process of seeking answers, a goodly number of us have developed wisdom about how to live, and a significant number have had fulfilled and meaningful lives.
Perhaps the essential thing is for each of us to study, reflect, and gradually let a personal understanding grow up within us—while letting go of the desire for hard and fixed knowledge in these areas. Perhaps a little humility is in order; perhaps wanting fixed knowledge about consciousness is a barrier rather than a help in the pursuit of true understanding. Maybe the process of reflecting for ourselves is the crucial thing, and attempting to live into our own answers, rather than having final answers served to us on a platter.
[1] Robert Lanza, Bob Berman, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (Dallas, Texas, BenBella Books, 2010), 2.
[2] Alex Tsakiris, Why Science Is Wrong…About Almost Everything (San Antonio, TX: Anomalist Books, 2014), 7-8.
[3] Alva Noë, author of Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Macmillian: Hill and Wang, 2010). This quote is from an interview of Noë about the book by Gordy Slack published in online Salon Magazine, March 25, 2009.
[4] William James, “Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine”, The Ingersoll Lectures on Human Immortality (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1897).
[5] Terry Bisson, “They’re Made Out Of Meat,” Omni Magazine, April 1991.
[6] David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3), (1995): 200-19.
[9] Wilder Penfield, The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1975).
[10] Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (United Kingdom: Harper and Brothers,1954), 20.
[11] Lisa Feldman Barrett, “What Emotions Are (and Aren’t),” New York Times, July 31, 2015.
[12] Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness (United Kingdom, Routledge, 2000)
[13] William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, “Is Life Worth Living?” (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1912), 16.
[14] Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938), 242.
[15] Internet post by friend and colleague of Bohm, David Peat: http://thebohmdocumentary.org/bohm-and-einstein/ Accessed August 26, 2015.
[18] Michio Kaku, Geophilosophical Association of Anthropological and Cultural Studies
[20] Ervin Laszlo and Jude Currivan. Cosmos: A Co-creator’s Guide to the Whole-World. ReadHowYouWant, 2013, xiii