Sad to say, but many physicists seem to be on
the verge of giving up. Some think they’ll never know how the universe came to
be, The multiverse is basically a cop-out, an excuse for abandoning the search
for answers. The other big bugaboo is consciousness. As John Horgan reports on Scientific American’s Cross-Check, no less a superstar than
Edward Witten now believes that consciousness “will remain a mystery.” All this
pessimism comes as a result of many decades of failure to make significant
progress on the hard questions.
The answers the physicists are seeking can be
found on this blog. So far, however, I’ve seen no indication that anybody
believes that. The biggest stumbling block may be that I’m an engineer, not a
physicist, so I’m a crackpot, in their minds. But setting that aside, I think
that there are serious stumbling blocks in the material itself. One is that the
current paradigm—the way physicists look at the world—has been so successful up
to now that they’re unable to believe that it has reached the end of its
usefulness and a new paradigm is needed, which is exactly what I’m proposing.
A second stumbling block is consciousness. They
don’t know what it is, but it’s obvious to them that it’s an emergent
phenomenon generated in the brain, while I’m saying that it’s fundamental, that
in fact it’s the source of the universe. Obviously some sort of zen craziness,
right?
In this post I’d like to focus on
consciousness. Nothing I haven’t already said in other posts, but emphasizing
the really critical, impossible-to-understand points.
First of all, what is consciousness? As I
explained here, human-style consciousness is a thought thinking itself. A what? Now
that’s a mind blower, isn’t it? Brains think thoughts; thoughts don’t think
themselves, right? Actually, there’s one thought that does think itself. “I
think, therefore I am.” Remember that? “I” is a thought, isn’t it? And what
that statement really means is “I observe myself, therefore I exist.” Or,
actually, “I think myself, therefore I exist.” René Descartes may not have
realized it, but he had discovered that consciousness is a thought that thinks
itself, actually creates itself,
because to think myself is to exist.,
Yes, to think myself is to exist, and it works
the other way, too--to exist is to think myself or to be conscious. Consciousness
is the same thought as existence—they’re identical concepts. This point is
absolutely crucial. If you don’t get it, you may still be able to do the
physics, but you’ll never completely understand the universe.
It makes sense that there’s something in the
universe that creates itself because if everything had to be created by
something else, nothing could ever exist. That something, we’ve found, is
existence or consciousness—same thing. It creates itself, so it can never die.
But wait! “I” can certainly die—must
die, in fact. Well, yes and no. A thought that creates itself is
self-referential, and self-reference is known to lead to logical paradoxes. In
case you hadn’t noticed, the universe is full of paradoxes, or dualities, as
physicists call them, and the physicists have found a neat way to deal with
them. It’s Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s principle
of complementarity. Say two observers examine something in different ways
and reach contradictory conclusions about its nature—it can’t possibly be both
ways at the same time. Bohr’s principle says that’s OK as long as no single
observer can see it both ways at the same time. It’s OK if one observer sees it
one way and another observer sees it as something completely incompatible. This
is another crucial point, because in spite of what I’ve said about
consciousness never dying, the “I” that we know always dies.
Maybe you’ve already guessed the solution. Yes,
there are two “I”s. Consciousness has two aspects, that is, there are two ways
of looking at it. The first is purely logical. It creates itself and nothing
else. It’s outside of time. It never changes. However, it has a logical
structure. There’s the consciousness that observes itself, there’s the
consciousness that’s observed, and there’s the relationship between these
two—identity. Three thoughts. Any time you have more than one thought, you
automatically have still more. With three you can make at least seven, and so
on ad infinitum. The existence of existence implies a huge number of thoughts
arranged in logical levels with the thoughts on each level implied by the
thoughts on the preceding level. This is a purely logical progression—it has
nothing to do with time. This aspect of existence is atemporal, as is the “I”
associated with it. It never dies.
On the other hand, that logical progression
from level to level looks an awful lot like a set of thoughts expanding in
time. Well, it is. That’s just another aspect of existence or
consciousness—just another way of looking at it. Both ways are correct. The
first way is the logical, atemporal way, and the second is the physical,
temporal way. Why physical? Because you can make the entire physical universe out
of that expanding set of thoughts. As I explained beginning here,
you just give those thoughts a new name—I’ve chosen spacetime points, and the rest is not difficult, as I’ve explained in
many of the posts on this blog following the one just mentioned.
So, Edward Witten, don’t give up. Consciousness
is just that thought you call “I”. Don’t overthink it. It’s the explanation for
everything, including itself. It creates itself, thinks itself. No other
explanation is possible or needed. But remember that it has two aspects. It’s
the atemporal one that creates itself. The temporal one is created by your
brain and dies when you do.
