For the average person, the notion of infinite universes bubbling up here, there, and everywhere is a nice piece of imagination, or could be pondered as weird science. In any case, there are many skeptics to challenge the multiverse, and as the argument rages, a bystander might raise his hand and ask, “Do we actually know what this universe is like? Never mind all those others.”
It’s a valid point. The multiverse is like a romance novel for the whole human race. In romance novels, the heroine ultimately finds Mr. Right. In the multiverse, human beings have found Mr. Right Cosmos. (Except that the odds of finding the right cosmos are essentially zero, vanishingly smaller than the chances of finding Mr. Right in everyday life.) The only question is whether, like our Harlequin heroine, fate made the perfect match or it was simply dumb luck. In this book we’re saying it is neither. The perfect match between human beings and the universe is about a meeting of the minds. The human mind matches the cosmic mind. In some mysterious way that science hasn’t explained, we find ourselves living in a conscious universe. Or to be truly mind-bending, we live in an unbounded state of consciousness that we call the universe.
Massive skepticism would greet this proposition at a typical physics or neuroscience conference, but we’ve already seen the mounting evidence of how the quantum domain acts in a mind-like way. This evidence has been studiously ignored. In modern physics, consciousness has been like a black hole, swallowing up every investigator who has tried to give definitive answers. No one has ever written a book titled Mind for Dummies, because the topic has defeated, and continues to defeat, the most brilliant thinkers. Humans are in the ironic position of knowing for certain that we have a mind, while at the same time finding that our mind can’t explain itself. Just asking “Where does a thought come from?” leads to bafflement, loud arguments, and a severe headache. Yet the beauty of a conscious universe lies in how many questions it solves at one stroke, as follows:
Q: Are human beings the only conscious creatures on Earth?
A: No. All living creatures participate in cosmic consciousness. In fact, all so-called inert objects participate in it, too.
Q: Does the brain produce the mind?
A: No. The brain is a physical instrument for processing mental events. Mind and brain can both be traced to the same source: cosmic consciousness.
Q: Is there consciousness “out there” in the universe?
A: Yes and no. Yes, there is consciousness everywhere in the universe. No, it isn’t “out there,” because “in here” and “out there” are no longer relevant concepts.
The simplicity of these answers is what appeals to any scientist who accepts the possibility of a cosmic mind. We are steadily climbing out of the black hole. Today there are papers, books, and conferences devoted to the conscious universe, and a mini-revolution is under way. To be realistic, though, mainstream science still prefers to ignore consciousness.
Science is in the habit of excluding assumptions that aren’t necessary to solving a problem. In the working world of physics, it’s irrelevant to E = mc2 or the Schrödinger equation or chaotic inflation if the universe is conscious. A huge amount of productive science has emerged by excluding the entire issue of the mind. (Just as treating a baby as a puppet is workable at a certain level.)
But that’s not the really peculiar part. What we find eminently strange is that scientists consider their own minds irrelevant. It’s simply a given, like breathing. When someone is bombarding protons in a particle accelerator, nobody says, “Make sure you’re breathing,” much less “Make sure you’re conscious.” Both are irrelevant assumptions. And yet, looked at another way, nothing is more important than the mind, especially if the human mind is somehow in sync with a cosmic mind. It matters to all of us if human beings have a cosmic dimension. All talk about being merely a speck in the vast coldness of outer space would come to an end forever. As Wheeler poetically put it, we are “the carriers of the central jewel, the flashing purpose that lights up the whole dark universe.”
GRASPING THE MYSTERY
The main roadblock to a cosmic mind is the assumption that the mind is always tainted by its subjectivity. Subjectivity is alien to data and numbers, the stuff that makes science a viable activity. General agreement is reached by studying the facts and nothing but the facts. In consciousness studies, however, objectivity is classified as a separate variety of human awareness, known as third-party consciousness, meaning that any third party can come on the scene and agree with what has been observed. For example, consider a team of geologists picking over the ground at Point Trinity, the spot in the New Mexico desert where the first atomic bomb was exploded on July 16, 1945. The first geologist spies an unusual mineral lying on the ground. As they examine it, the second geologist agrees that it looks like nothing he’s ever seen before.
The rock specimen is tested by other geologists, and a consensus is reached. The enormous heat of that first atomic blast created a mineral unknown anywhere else on Earth, which they named trinitite. The desert sand, composed primarily of quartz and feldspar, was fused into this glassy green residue, which is mildly radioactive but not dangerous.
The discovery of trinitite neatly conforms to third-party consciousness. By eliminating all subjective reactions (known as first-party consciousness), objectivity is assured, or so they say. There is also second-party consciousness, the “you” that sits across the table from “me.” Second-party consciousness is almost as untrustworthy as first-party consciousness, since two people can share the same delusion. No one has shown how to go from two observers sharing the same experience to actual objectivity.
Throwing out any reference to consciousness except for the third-party kind is enormously convenient if you’re a physicalist. It also sweeps a huge amount of experience under the carpet, all along saying this is the only way to do science. Looking around at the modern world, which was built on science and technology, one is looking at the vast possibilities of third-party consciousness. You can see why science is so eager to throw out first-person consciousness, the “I” of everyday experience. Rembrandt can say “That’s my self-portrait,” but Einstein can’t say, “That’s my relativity. If you want some relativity, get your own.”
Yet, by making third-party consciousness the norm, we wind up with a science-fiction world where no “I” exists. To see the weirdness of the situation, try walking around and referring to yourself only in the third person. He just got out of bed. She is brushing her teeth. They seem reluctant to go to work, but they have to put food on the table. It cannot be denied that subjectivity is messy, but it’s also how experience works. Things happen to people, not to pronouns.
Naturally, every scientist has an “I” and a personal life. But in the models of reality developed by physics and modern science in general, the universe is a third-party experience. As John Archibald Wheeler famously said, it’s as if we look at the universe through a foot-thick piece of glass when what we should be doing is breaking the glass.
An unconscious universe is a dead universe, while the universe that human beings experience is alive, creative, and evolving toward magnificent structures that are even more creative. If the latest data from the Kepler observatory are valid, the number of earth-like planets in the observable universe may be as many as 1 followed by 22 zeros. The enormous number of planets that might sustain life could be proof that a conscious universe is expressing itself many times over.
The argument about how humans evolved on Earth can’t be settled as long as consciousness itself remains a mystery. When we talk about it, consciousness needs to be clear, reasonable, and believable. No mode—first-person, second-person, or third-person—can be banished. There must be a level playing field, with no pronouns playing favorites just because they can get away with it.
WHEN ATOMS LEARNED TO THINK
Everything in the cosmos is either conscious or unconscious. Or, to be more precise about our terms, an object is either participating in the domain of mind or it isn’t. Choosing which is which, however, isn’t as easy as it appears. Why do we say the brain is conscious? The brain is made up of ordinary atoms and molecules. Its calcium is the same as the calcium in the White Cliffs of Dover; its iron is the same as the iron in a two-penny nail. As thinkers, nails and the White Cliffs of Dover aren’t famous, but we all accept that the human brain has a privileged place in the universe, meaning that its atoms are somehow unique compared with the same atoms in “dead” matter.
When a molecule of glucose passes through the blood-brain barrier (a cellular gatekeeper that determines which molecules are allowed to pass from the bloodstream into the brain), the glucose doesn’t change physically. Yet somehow it contributes to the processes we call thinking, feeling, and perceiving. How can the simple sugar regularly used to nourish hospital patients through an IV tube learn how to think? That question goes to the heart of the mystery. If all objects in the universe are either part of consciousness or are not, the conscious ones learned how to think, and yet no one has ever explained how this occurred.
Really, the whole notion of atoms learning to think is totally irrational. The exact moment when atoms acquired consciousness will never be located. Linking mind and matter has been labeled “the hard problem” and has become the focus of intense debate. Out of the 118 elements found, only 6 make up 97 percent of the human body: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. If anyone hopes to mix and match these atoms in such a hugely complex way that they suddenly start to think, this would seem like a naïve goal. But in essence that’s the only explanation offered for how the human brain became the organ of consciousness.
With billions of base pairs contributing to the double helix of human DNA, complexity becomes bewildering enough to serve as a plausible cover for ignorance. Telling which objects are conscious and which are not is very tricky. Calling the entire cosmos conscious is just as plausible as calling it unconscious. The argument can’t be settled simply on physical grounds.
The mystery boils down to a clear-cut choice: is the universe made of matter that learned to think, or is the universe made of mind that created matter? We can call this the divide between “matter first” and “mind first.” Although “matter first” is the default position of science, the quantum century seriously undermined it.
One popular view tries to rescue the “matter first” position by cleverly turning everything into information. We are surrounded by information on all sides. If you receive an e-mail announcing a sale on smartphones, a piece of new information has come your way. Yet the photons that strike your retina as you read the computer screen also carry information, which gets transformed into faint electrical impulses in the brain that are another kind of information. Nothing is exempt. At bottom, anything a person can say, think, or do can be computerized in the form of digital code using only 1s and 0s.
A model can be developed where the observer is a bundle of information looking out upon a universe that is an even bigger bundle of information. Suddenly, mind and matter find common ground. Some cosmologists consider this a viable alternative to a conscious universe. All it takes, we are told, is to define consciousness purely as information. An articulate proponent of this view is physicist Max Tegmark of MIT. He begins his argument by dividing consciousness into two problems, one easy, the other hard.
PROBLEMS EASY AND HARD
The easy problem (which is hard enough) is to understand how the brain processes information. We’ve made strides in that direction, Tegmark maintains, considering that computers are now advanced enough to defeat the world’s chess champion and translate the most difficult foreign languages. Their ability to process information will one day surpass the human brain’s abilities, and then it will be nearly impossible to say which is conscious, the machine or a human being. The hard problem is “Why do we have subjective experience?” No matter how much you know about the hardware of the brain, you haven’t really explained how microvolts of electricity and a handful of dancing molecules can deliver a person’s awe at seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time or the rush of joy that music produces. In the inner world of thoughts and feelings, data get left behind.
“The hard problem” acquired its official name thanks to philosopher David Chalmers, but it has been around for centuries as “the mind-body problem.” Tegmark sees a solution by relying on a scientist’s treasured ally, mathematics. To a physicist, he says, a human being is just food whose atoms and molecules have been rearranged in complicated ways. “You are what you eat” is literally true.
How is food rearranged to produce a subjective experience like being in love? Its atoms and molecules, from the perspective of physics, are just an amalgam of quarks and electrons. Tegmark rejects a force beyond the physical universe (i.e., God) butting in. The soul is also out. If you measure what all the particles in your brain are doing, he argues, and these particles perfectly obey the laws of physics, then the action of the soul is zero—it adds nothing to the physical picture.
If the soul is pushing the particles around, even by a small amount, science would be able to measure the exact effect the soul is having. Voilà, the soul becomes just another physical force with properties that can be studied the way we study gravity. Now Tegmark unveils the idea that either solves the hard problem or turns out to be a very clever sleight-of-hand. As a physicist, he says, the activity of particles in the brain is nothing but a mathematical pattern in space-time.
Dealing with “a bunch of numbers” transforms the hard problem. Instead of asking “Why do we have subjective experience?” we can look at the known properties of particles and ask a question based on hard facts, “Why are some particles arranged so that we feel we are having a subjective experience?” This may sound like a movie scene where absentminded Professor Brainiac is scribbling equations on the blackboard to explain why he’s attracted to Marilyn Monroe sitting in the front row. But Tegmark’s trick of turning the subjective world into a physics problem has obvious appeal within his field.
But it’s not hard to be skeptical. Einstein’s mind produced wonderful calculations; it’s unlikely that wonderful calculations can produce Einstein’s mind. But Tegmark argues that they can. The things that exist all around us, he says, possess properties that can’t be explained simply by looking at the atoms and molecules they are made of. The H2O molecule doesn’t change as water turns into ice or steam. It simply acquires the properties of ice and steam—so-called emergent properties. “Like solids, liquids, and gases,” Tegmark declares, “I think that consciousness too is an emergent phenomenon. If I go to sleep and my consciousness goes away, I’m still made of the same particles. The only thing that changed was how the particles are arranged.”
We are using Tegmark here to stand for a whole class of thinkers who believe that math holds the key to explaining the mind. In their view consciousness is no different from any other phenomenon in nature. Numbers can be assigned to information, and information is defined by Tegmark and others as “what particles know about each other.” At this point a great deal more complexity must be introduced, but you’ve gotten the key concepts.
The focus burns brightest on the integrated information theory proposed by Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin. To bridge the gap between mind and matter, Tononi and his colleagues devised a “consciousness detector” that can be used medically, for example, to indicate if someone who is completely paralyzed still has consciousness. Such a development is intriguing for brain research in many ways.
But information theorists are hunting for bigger game. They want 1s and 0s, the basic units of digital information, to explain consciousness in the cosmos at large. It’s true that particles with positive and negative charges can easily be described with a 1 or a 0, and the same holds true anytime a property in nature has an opposite, the way gravity may be coupled with antigravity. But do numbers really help us to get from lifeless particles to love, hate, beauty, enjoyment—all the things happening “in here”? Highly improbable. Knowing that water acquires the emergent properties of ice doesn’t get you to ice sculptures. Something else is obviously at work.
We are told that information is “what particles know about each other,” but that’s the problem, not the solution. The notion that throwing in more and more information will build a full-fledged human mind is like saying that if you add more cards to the deck, they will suddenly start playing poker. Jacks, queens, and aces all carry information, but that’s not the same as knowing what to do with the information, which requires a mind.
LETTING REALITY SPEAK FOR ITSELF
Everyone who has tackled the problem of consciousness feels that they have reality on their side. Yet if you look more closely, no theoretical model can tell us what’s real. Radar can tell you when it’s raining, but only you can tell that rain is wet—experience is the only judge. It’s remarkable that the nuclear inferno inside a star can be reduced to 0s and 1s, but the concepts of zero and one are human. Without us, they wouldn’t exist.
In fact, there is no information anywhere in nature without a human being who understands the concept of information. With information theory severely undermined, the most common fallback is to say, “We can wait for a better theory someday. Meanwhile, there’s new brain research emerging every day. It will tell us the story eventually.” But this kind of certainty is based on a very shaky assumption, that Brain = Mind.
The entire field of neuroscience is based on this assumption. Undoubtedly there is activity in the brain when a person is alive and conscious, while death brings the cessation of this activity. But imagine a world where all music comes through radios. If the radios break down, the music dies. Yet this event wouldn’t prove that radios are the source of music. They transmit it, which is a big difference from their being Mozart or Bach. The same could be true of the brain. It could simply be the transmitting device that brings us our thoughts and feelings. No matter how powerful brain scans ever become, there’s no proof that neural activity creates the mind.
The problem with Brain = Mind is twofold. First, there’s the assumption that the mind is an epiphenomenon, in other words, a secondary effect. If you light a bonfire, the primary phenomenon is combustion; the secondary phenomenon is the heat that the fire gives off. Heat is an epiphenomenon. In brain research, it’s assumed that the physical activity inside neurons is the primary phenomenon; the subjective sense of thinking, feeling, and sensing is secondary. Mind becomes an epiphenomenon. Yet it’s fairly obvious that being aware of who you are, where you are, and what the world looks like—everything that comes with mind—is just as likely to be primary. Music came before radios, and this fact isn’t undermined by studying how radios work down to their atoms and molecules.
The second problem with Brain = Mind is that we have no way to see nature accurately. It’s hard to grasp just how complete our blindness to reality is. The narrator in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin is a nameless young man who has arrived in Germany during the rise of Hitler. Instead of showing us how appalled he is, Isherwood wants us to make our own judgments, because only then will we believe in the horror of what the narrator sees. The young man begins his tale by saying,
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.
But a camera is exactly what the human brain isn’t, or the human mind. We are participants in reality, which makes us totally involved. Quantum physics is famous for bringing the observer into the whole problem of doing science, and equally famous for not solving what the observer’s role is.
The practice of science didn’t grind to a halt waiting for the solution, and therefore a fallback position has been adopted: leave the observer out. For some physicists, this means “leave the observer out for the time being,” while for others, the vast majority, it means “leave the observer out all the time—it’s not as if he really matters.” But reality begins with “I am,” minus the camera. Every person wakes up in the morning to face the world through first-party consciousness. It’s an inescapable fact.
With two strikes against it, Brain = Mind should be seriously doubted. Ironically, however, the mind needs the brain and can’t do without it, so far as we know. Like the imaginary world where radios are the only way to access music, our world has no access to the mind except through the human brain. In his memoirs, psychiatrist David Viscott reported a life-changing incident that happened to him in a hospital when he was in training. He walked into a patient’s room just as the patient died, and in that instant he saw a light leave the body, for all the world like the soul or spirit departing.
The fact that he had seen such a thing—which isn’t uncommon among hospice workers—shook Viscott’s beliefs to their core. His worldview couldn’t account for such a phenomenon, and he knew that his medical colleagues wouldn’t believe him. If they had a soul, that didn’t mean they believed in souls. Likewise, even if your brain is just a receiving device for the mind, you can still argue that the brain is the mind. (Another proof that your belief system is more powerful than reality.)
FOLLOW THE MOVING ARROW
Is there any way to settle the dispute between “mind first” and “matter first”? If our beliefs stand in the way, perhaps reality must speak for itself, so there is no mistaking the results. One avenue stems from many centuries ago, in a paradox first posed in the fifth century BCE by Greek philosopher Zeno. The common term for it is Zeno’s arrow paradox.
As an arrow flies through the air, Zeno said, we can observe it at any instant in time. When we do, the arrow occupies a specific position. For the instant that it holds any position, the arrow isn’t moving. So if time is a series of instants, it follows that the arrow is always motionless. How can an arrow be moving and motionless at the same time? That’s the paradox, and it came to life two millennia later in the quantum Zeno effect, a term coined by George Sudarshan and Baidyanath Misra of the University of Texas. This time the object being observed isn’t an arrow but a quantum state (such as a molecule undergoing a transition) that would ordinarily decay in a finite amount of time.
A quantum state that should decay is frozen by continuous observations. In many, though not all, interpretations of quantum mechanics, the wave-like behavior of a particle “collapses” into a state we can measure and observe thanks to the observer, although how the observer tinkers with this transition is highly controversial. As we’ve seen, the actual moment when a molecular state would decay can’t be determined but only estimated, using probabilities. But in the quantum Zeno effect, the intervention of observation changes the system from an unstable one to a stable one.
Can you stand around watching a molecule constantly, to see when the actual event occurs? No, and that’s the paradox. If an observer watches continuously or at superfast intervals, the state being observed will never decay. As with viewing a flying arrow in chopped-up instants of time, observing unstable quantum systems subdivides the chopped-up activity so finely that nothing happens. By analogy, imagine that you are a wedding photographer taking a picture of the bride. When you say “Smile,” the bride says, “I can’t smile when the camera is pointing at me.” Now you’re stuck. As long as you have the camera on her, there will be no smile. If you take the camera away, there will be no picture of her smile. This is the essence of the quantum Zeno effect.
Why should this help settle the argument between “mind first” and “matter first”? It brings “I” back into the equation. The quantum Zeno effect shows that reality is like a bride who smiles naturally only as long as a camera isn’t pointing at her. She doesn’t like being looked at. But there’s the rub. We are always looking at reality. There is no such thing as looking away. Which means that how the universe behaves when no one is looking has no meaning. (Of course, since human beings have only been around for a fraction of the life of the universe, it remains an open question as to what an observation really is and, by implication, who is doing the observing. For many physicists, there can be no observer who isn’t human. We will return to this point later.)
The “matter first” camp refuses to accept this inescapable fact about constant observation. They are like a wedding photographer who says to the bride, “I don’t care if you can’t smile when a camera is on you. I’m going to keep the camera on you until I catch a smile.” He can wait forever. Apparently so can the “matter first” camp, despite the quantum Zeno effect. It tells us that we will never see a particular molecule undergo a transition as long as we insist on looking at it. In fact, the more observations you make, the more frozen the unstable system will be.
So it must follow that the more we look at the world, and the closer we get to its finest structure, the more we are freezing it in place. Somehow observation gives specificity to reality. Reality slips through Sherlock Holmes’s magnifying glass just when he thinks he’s spotted a clue. But before the “mind first” camp starts to cheer, the quantum Zeno effect has bad news for them, too. There is no separate observer. The “matter first” people are stuck because they can’t report what a physical system is doing when it behaves naturally. The “mind first” people are stuck because they can’t produce an independent observer. The so-called observer effect only works if an observer can stand outside the system he wants to observe.
You can chop the observer up, as it were, by asking him to take a measurement of one small thing, such as detecting a photon as it passes through a slit. If you watch all the time, however, the observer has no way to step back from the thing he’s watching. This is why the quantum Zeno effect is sometimes called the watchdog effect. Imagine a bulldog chained to the back door of a house. The dog has been trained to keep its eyes on the back door constantly, and to bark if anything suspicious happens. Unfortunately, the bulldog is so fixed on guarding the back door that burglars can sneak in the front door or a side window or anywhere else they please. You might as well not have a watchdog. In the same way, any observation made in physics locks the observer’s attention on a single thing. As long as the two are locked, anything else could be happening all around and no one would know it. You might as well not have an observer.
This lock between observer and observed lies at the heart of the quantum Zeno effect. How can we break the lock? There’s a good deal of controversy over that. Maybe the lock can’t be broken. Maybe it can be broken through an equation but not in real life. Amidst all this speculation, something wonderful has occurred. Reality has spoken for itself, which was just the thing we needed. Reality’s message is intimate: “I have you in my embrace. We are locked together, and the more you try to break away, the tighter my embrace becomes.”
In other words, “matter first” and “mind first” must both surrender to “reality first.” The observer has nowhere to stand outside reality. He’s like a fish who wants to escape the sea only to find that if it jumps out of the water, it perishes. For human beings, participating in the universe is how we exist. To exist is to be aware. That’s the long and the short of it for human beings. Astonishingly, the same is true for the universe. Without consciousness, it would vanish in a puff of smoke, like a dream, leaving nothing behind and no one to know that it ever existed. Even to say that the universe is conscious doesn’t go far enough. As we will convincingly argue, the universe is consciousness itself. Until that conclusion is accepted, reality’s message hasn’t been completely heard.