Consciousness is a very difficult thing to define. People have been trying to explain consciousness, and trying to figure out what exactly it is. What it means for us as human beings. Why we even have it.
ANDREW NEWBERG
What is a simple definition of consciousness? You know, it’s the most difficult thing to define.
Nick Herbert earned his Ph.D. in experimental physics from Stanford University. For years, he was senior scientist at Memorex Corporation in Silicon Valley, and worked in magnetic, electrostatic, optical and thermal physics. He wrote Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, and taught science at all levels (from kindergarten to graduate school). Remember Bell’s Theorem (proving the existence of non-locality) from previous chapters? Nick Herbert has created the most concise mathematical proof of this revolutionary feature of the universe that demonstrates interconnectedness beyond space and time. And what is he interested in now? Consciousness.
Why are we here? Well, that is the ultimate question, isn’t it? By we, I assume you mean conscious
beings, that’s we.
—Stuart Hameroff, M.D.
Do you think science will understand that better than having to handle a hot potato called consciousness that has so much cultish religion, backwater voodoo attached to it?
—Ramtha
“My real notion is that consciousness is the toughest problem,” he says, “and that physics has basically taken off on the easy problems. . . . We may find all the forces and all the particles of nature—that’s physics’ quest—but then what? Then we have to really tackle some of these harder problems—the nature of mind, the nature of God, and bigger problems that we don’t even know how to ask about yet.”
What Is Consciousness?
We all have it. (Don’t we?) We are all aware, conscious beings. (On a good day.) We have seen that quantum physics has brushed up against consciousness in its quest for answers about reality and perception. “It” goes with us all the time: Every sense experience, thought, action and interaction plays out on the field of consciousness.
Consciousness is fundamental to all that we do—art, science, relationships, life; it’s the constant of our lives. And yet science has done very little to examine it deeply. In its nearly 400-year life span, “science has made immense progress in comprehending the physical universe at all scales from quark to quasar,” says Herbert. But consciousness remains “an intellectual black hole.”
Many scientists, in physics as well as psychology, who are still wedded to the materialist/Newtonian paradigm, dismiss consciousness as a product of brain functioning. (The word they most often use is epiphenomenon, which means essentially a side effect or by-product.) Essentially this says the “me” sense of you is an “oops” accident of evolution. And that when the brain dies, the “oops” goes away, and the packaging joins the other consumed wrappers in the dump.
Barking Up the Wrong Tree
If consciousness is so important and fundamental, why is so little known about it? One explanation is that it’s like looking for your glasses while they’re sitting on your nose—it’s just always there, and so it’s taken for granted. Another reason is that we live in an extremely materialistic age, which has been dominated by a materialistic science; in other words, as a culture, we are interested in the “stuff out there,” and not so interested in what goes on “in here.”
Our brain research has helped to illuminate higher states of consciousness beyond waking, dreaming and sleeping. There are as many as seven states of consciousness. In addition to the three that we normally experience, there’s pure consciousness. It’s the simplest state of human consciousness, a deeply settled, silent state of unbounded awareness in which the mind identifies with and experiences the unified field of all laws of nature.
—John Hagelin, Ph.D.
Even when we turn our attention inward, we’ve been more interested in the content of consciousness, the stuff that populates the neuronets—thoughts, dreams, plans, speculations—than in consciousness itself. We’re interested in the images of the movie, but we forget that without the screen on which the images play, nothing would be there.
But probably the most important reason is that consciousness doesn’t fit in the Newtonian paradigm. It’s not made out of measurable stuff. You can’t put a meter on consciousness. And most scientists remain immersed in the worldview split apart hundreds of years ago by Descartes: The intangible, or non-physical, or spiritual are forever separate from the physical. Therefore to explain consciousness they have only a brain-based phenomenon of chemistry and neural circuits. And in that paradigm, scientists have gone so far as to call consciousness an anomaly.
Say what? My consciousness, your consciousness, the basic fact of our existence, an anomaly—a “deviation from the normal”?
The fact is that currently science doesn’t have the framework to understand consciousness. It’s a “hard question”—so for the most part, scientists have turned their backs on it and gone on to other things. This is standard procedure when paradigms are challenged (and people’s livelihoods are at stake). “When paradigm anomalies first arise,” notes physicist and philosopher Peter Russell, “they are usually overlooked or rejected.”
It’s an interesting point of view, this quantum bandwagon. For example, is consciousness only quantum? Is it only explained by quantum physics? I used to think so, back when I was thinking, back in the seventies. I don’t think so anymore. I’m now convinced that, uh, quantum mechanics may not be enough.
—Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D.
Unraveling the Bouncing Balls
In the late 19th century, the Newtonian model of the world as a giant mechanism filled with solid things that bounced into each other like billiard balls was standard doctrine. As Columbia University physicist David Albert has pointed out, “This sufficed very, very well until around the middle of the 19th century when investigations into electromagnetism by people like Faraday, and culminating in the work of Maxwell at the end of the 19th century, began to make it look as if particles weren’t the complete catalog of the furniture of the universe anymore.” The electromagnetic phenomena could not be explained in terms of the accepted principles of physics; yet they could not be dismissed. So, against the prevailing winds of orthodoxy, it became necessary to take fields into account. As Dr. Albert says, “Fields had been talked about at least as early as the beginning of the 19th century, but for a long time they were not taken seriously.” Now they were accepted as intrinsic, fundamental aspects of the cosmos.
It may be time to do the same with consciousness, and the challenge may be similar. As electromagnetic charge and the electrical and magnetic fields had a different quality or nature from the solid objects that were at the heart of the Newtonian model, consciousness is an even more subtle level of reality than even forces or force fields. But, if it is a level of reality, and if physics is to come up with a genuine “theory of everything,” consciousness will have to be included.
The Anomalies
“This profound shift in physicists’ conception of the basic nature of their endeavor, and of the meanings of their formulas, was not a frivolous move: It was a last resort.”
—Henry Stapp
Remember that line? It was in the “Observer” chapter, and it talked about how the strange behavior of the subatomic world forced scientists to shift. Or as it has been said: “It was a beautiful theory destroyed by an ugly fact.” Are there any “ugly facts” forcing the scientific world to adopt “last resorts”?
• Most people have had at least one experience that cannot be explained by normal means or the blow-off line: “just a coincidence.”
• Scores of near-death experiences have been studied that report very similar experiences while out of the body.
• Past-life regressions have produced obscure facts from times past that the subject had no access to and which have turned out to be true.
• Remote viewing—the ability to transcend space and time to gain information—has been so successful that the United States and Soviet Union had teams of remote viewers doing spy work.
• Experiments show statistically how human intent changes random quantum processes (and not just collapsing wave functions either).
• Miraculous healings.
• Prophetic dreams.
The list goes on. It starts looking a little silly (some would say ugly) to insist that all of these data points are just illusions, coincidences and swamp gas. And to deny that consciousness may be a reality unto itself.
Unraveling Consciousness
Many scientific thinkers, such as Amit Goswami, Peter Russell and David Chalmers (director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona), are arguing strongly for the inclusion of consciousness within the new framework of science. “If the existence of consciousness cannot be derived from physical laws,” says Chalmers, “a theory of physics is not a true theory of everything. So a final theory must contain an additional fundamental component. Toward this end, I propose that conscious experience be considered a fundamental feature, irreducible to anything more basic.”
Nick Herbert has come to a similar conclusion. “I believe mind is a fundamental process in its own right, as widespread and deeply embedded in nature as light or electricity,” he says.
And science, in its inexorable, steady pursuit, is moving in this direction. Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose have put forward a theory of consciousness based on the microtubules in the brain. (We’ll get into this in the “Quantum Brain” chapter, along with other quantum-based theories.) Consciousness study programs are appearing in universities. Conferences are drawing a very diverse and interested crowd of scientists, scholars and mystics, all grappling with the seemingly simple question: What is consciousness? But that is no different from the traditional scientific disciplines, grappling with the seemingly simple question: What is reality? As with so many things—it’s two sides of the same coin.
And Pete Russell thinks it may be time to flip it: “Rather than assuming that consciousness somehow arises from the material world, as most scientists do, we need to consider the alternative worldview put forward by many metaphysical and spiritual traditions in which consciousness is held to be a fundamental component of reality—as fundamental as space, time and matter, perhaps even more so.”
I think consciousness is this awareness we have, this inner life we have of experience, which puts us apart from robots or zombies, who might be having complex behavior, going about their business and doing things without having any inner life or experience. I would say consciousness is a sequence of discrete events. These conscious events, which are actually this particular type of quantum state reduction due to this threshold at the fundamental level (of space/time geometry), occur roughly forty times a second.
—Stuart Hameroff, M.D.
Is Consciousness King?
In fact, most spiritual traditions maintain that consciousness is not “a” fundamental component; it is “the” fundamental component. Everything springs from the underlying well of consciousness.
Dr. Hagelin is convinced this is the case:
The very earliest experience, the beginning of the universe you could say, is when pure consciousness, the unified field seeing itself, creates within its essentially unified nature the threefold structure of observer, observed and process of observation. From that, at that deepest level of reality, consciousness creates creation so, yes, there is a very intimate relationship between the observer and the observed. They are ultimately united as one inseparable wholeness at the basis of creation, which is the unified field, which is also our own innermost consciousness, the self.
And with all the unanswered definitions and questions about consciousness, how have Dr. Hagelin, Teresa of Avila, Christ Jesus, Lao Tse, Eckhart Tolle, the Vedantic Sages1 ever achieved any clarity on this issue? By using consciousness to investigate consciousness. Just as the physical scientists use physical measuring devices, the explorers in consciousness use that vehicle to discover that reality. Remember Ed Mitchell’s recounting of his moment of cosmic consciousness? It seems a common experience to those who have it—the boundaries of the self go away to reveal that the self is everything, everywhere, all the time. Suggesting that not only is consciousness not created by the brain, but that the brain limits consciousness. (Which is probably a good idea when you’re driving.)
And what’s it like when the explorers in consciousness return? Says Dr. Andrew Newberg:
When people have that (mystical) experience, they perceive it to represent a more fundamental level of reality than our everyday material reality that we normally live in. In fact, even when they’re no longer having that mystical experience, they still perceive that reality to be the more real, to represent the more truer form, the more fundamental form of reality. And the material world that we live in is kind of a more secondary reality for them.
If that is the case, then why wait for the shocking, over-the-top mystical experience to wake you from your material reality? What happens when you begin creating mystical experiences within your consciousness? The answer, of course, is that you’ll change your reality.
But are you changing the reality “out there”? Certainly as the physical world becomes secondary, your experiences are fundamentally changed. For instance, the scratch on the new car isn’t as big a deal, but can the scratch be changed? The good news and the bad news is—only you can determine that for yourself. It’s “bad” because no one can make that discovery for you, “good” because once you do, no one can ever tell you no.
Ponder These for a While . . .
• Is consciousness the unified field? What are you basing your answer on?
• Most people who have a near-death experience report the same thing: being “out of their bodies,” going down a tunnel, seeing a light at the end of it and feeling bliss. Can these accounts be turned into a science? If so, how?
• How many people have to agree on something before it’s a “fact”? What about the Middle Ages when everyone agreed the Earth was flat?
• What other anomalies do you know about? Which ones have you experienced?
• If consciousness is “the ground of all being” and the first cause, how can you ever be “conscious of consciousness”?
• How would you define the relationship between reality and consciousness? Is it hierarchical (one creates the other), or a tangled hierarchy (chicken and egg)?
• Why did the chicken (consciousness) cross the road (reality)?
• Although that’s kind of funny, it is a real question: If consciousness is the first cause, why is it compelled to experience reality? Why are you?