The Theory of Everything in Mind

 

The Theory of Everything in Mind

by Craig Willms

 

Part I

Recent events have had me turn my thoughts over to big picture topics. Contemplating one’s demise will do that. A combination of serious health issues and the coronavirus pandemic set me on a course to consider what will ultimately come of me.

Being born into a Christian family I’ve always taken it on faith that Heaven awaits me - provided I live well and fly right so to speak. For some that's enough, faith alone. Alas for many it’s not. There are those who wonder, those who need to know. Those with curious, logical minds not easily satisfied with simplistic sounding jargon. I say this as a seeker myself, blind faith is not enough.

Ahh, science my friend, science will provide the answers, right?

            Back in the 1990’s when the World Wide Web opened new and interesting worlds, I came across the term: The Theory of Everything, aka the unified field theory. I had been exploring something called String Theory in the process of reading Brian Greene’s book The Elegant Universe. I would never claim to grasp even 10% of what Greene and other theorists were getting at with String Theory. Neither could I really understand the related fundamentals of quantum mechanics. Nor could I, for that matter, wrap my mind around Einstein’s famous theories of General and Special Relativity. I understood just enough to be simultaneously fascinated and baffled.

            The problem it seems that despite more than hundred years of modern science and some of the most intelligent people who had ever lived The Theory of Everything is still elusive. Without going too deep the basic issue has always been that the four fundamental forces of nature have not been harmonized into one coherent theory. Quantum physics deals with the very small and the forces that control it, namely the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism. As it happens these three forces are nicely integrated. Then there is gravity, that which deals with the very large. Gravity has been defined by what is does, predictably so, but not what it is. No one knows. Gravity just doesn’t fit, there is nothing explains how these 4 forces condense into one tidy theory of everything.

          

         Modern physics, undaunted, continues to delve deeply into the minutiae of quantum mechanics seemingly unconcerned with the problems that gravity poses to an elegant theory, and likewise cosmologists continue to study the vast spaces between the stars and galaxies. I suppose each presumes they will reveal the “truth” with what they ultimately discover.

        In 2013 I stumbled across a what I believed to be paradigm shift that crashed down on gravity alone as the controlling force of the universe and replaced it with electric current at a cosmic scale. It doesn’t negate gravity; it merely surpasses it as an infinitely superior force. What space age observation with its modern tools has revealed is what seems to be a vast network of filaments connecting the planets, stars and galaxies powered by electric current. Modern imagery makes it clear that we are seeing these heavenly bodies as connected entities. The connecting medium is plasma, and the force is electricity. Thus, I remain intrigued by this idea despite the complete disregard that mainstream science and academia hold for the plasma/electric universe theory. More on how this all ties in later.

            As time went on, I became in some sense disillusioned by science, or rather I was disillusioned by smug atheistic scientists. This is primarily because they are so dismissive of man as anything other than a biological machine, incapable of having anything so amorphous as an independent soul or possessing any semblance of free will. Everything I ever believed or experienced in my nearly 60 years belies the notion that we are merely meat puppets driven by programmed instinct. We are not just smart animals.

            Make no mistake science has accomplished remarkable things, especially in manipulating materials and making of medicines and such. I don’t mean to diminish any of it or wish to become accused of being a luddite or - God forbid - a ‘science denier’.  The pursuit of scientific knowledge has enhanced human life exponentially. Still, there are things science can’t explain and never will. We need to be OK with that; science is not necessarily the last last word.

            When science exploded into the culture a few centuries ago it turned the lights on, illuminating so many of the misconstrued ideas of a dark past. It literally ushered a period of enlightenment that we enjoy to this day. What we call the hard sciences gave us many of the ‘hows’, but there are still a lot of ‘why’ questions, to say nothing of the eternal questions, science as it were, has no answers for.

Part II

            

            That brings us to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, something that materialist science has never been able to put its all-knowing stamp on. In my mind it is the most fascinating contemplation known to man. What is this thing we call consciousness? Is it an irreducible feature of reality or an illusion of biology. Turn the page to 2021 when I saw a YouTube video that at the same time gave me some clarity and a little comfort. Could consciousness be that elusive theory that explains everything?

            Modernity’s conventional acceptance places consciousness in the realm of the individual and confined to the brain. This makes a certain amount of sense since each of us is an individual and is capable of conscious thought. But is consciousness merely a bio-chemical process as the materialist insists? Do we only perceive this thing we call consciousness in our waking state due to our biological programming? Evolutionary biologists and logical thinkers describe it as the inevitable result of the function of our advanced biology. But is it?

            Science continues to pursue the question of consciousness with rigorous determination. One current speculation is that consciousness works as a predictive process which the mind/body uses it to navigate through the world. Consciousness therefore activates an affective response as needed when for instance if we should face severe distress or danger. For example: breathing is normally an unconscious process, not requiring direct attention. The affective response to sudden oxygen depletion would send alarm bells in the form of high emotion through the mind. This goes a long way toward defining a role consciousness plays in our survival, but does it really answer the big question, the hard question? I think not.

            In the long study of consciousness it eventually gets to a point where the next question can’t be answered. Despite decades, even centuries of study there is no definitive explanation as to what exactly consciousness is. What is it made of? Where does it come from? Ultimately where does it go when we die?

            The fundamental questions of experience and awareness and recall comes to mind. This is what consciousness means to most people. These things are difficult to explain in scientific terms. Again, science might say that like consciousness, self-awareness is the byproduct of biological processes, all perfectly logical. Is it though? There is a whole area of thought being studied by serious people like David Chalmers and Donald Hoffman that awareness and experience are just how we perceive objective reality in order to survive. Reality itself is essentially an illusionary construct, a simulation.

            When we think of simulations we think of computers, as in virtual reality or computer games. Taken to its logical conclusion this line of thought raises the question are we just a computer game to some vastly superior being? Are we all just changing voltages on a cosmic circuit board? It’s easy to dismiss this as so much crazy talk. I know I certainly did. For God’s sake we know what reality is, we live it every day.

            What happens if we try to extract ourselves from such a narrow notion of reality. By that I mean our biology, our five senses, clearly limit how we can experience the world. We humans see the world via a limited set of senses that by no means paints the whole picture of reality. Think about what reality looks like to a butterfly. He sees the world – the same world we live in– in a completely different way. His eyes are set up to find flowers in an extraordinarily different way than we “see” flowers. His marvelous wings catch and use the wind to move through the world.  He probes his bizarre tongue deep into the flower for the payoff of luscious nectar. His reality is totally alien to us. If we perceived the world as a butterfly does we’d quickly die. Every type of metabolic lifeform has a different perception of reality, yet we all live in the same world, the same so-called reality. Is it then so hard to understand that reality is what we perceive and experience based on our survival needs?

            Scientist Donald Hoffman has some compelling thoughts and conceptual underpinnings to the idea that our reality is an illusion, that we don’t experience reality as it actually is. Consider that literally everything is made up a smaller and smaller elements, molecules, cells, atoms, subatomic particles and beyond, that are sufficiently mysterious and impossible to perceive with our five senses without powerful instruments. Picture if you will an iceberg in the ocean. Your version of reality is the tip that protrudes above the water, whereas we understand but can't see the gigantic portion of the iceberg below the waterline. It's the tip of the iceberg that helps make sense of the world without actually perceiving all the complicated processes and forces that make up the underlying fabric of ‘reality’. 

            When I first heard that scientists were theorizing that we exist in a holographic simulation I was completely dismissive. They were telling me what I see and experience everyday isn’t real… Poppycock. My pain is real, and pain, more than anything else in this life is confirmation of reality. I wasn’t buying any of it – not even a little.

            It wasn’t until I saw the previously mentioned YouTube video did all the pieces start to fall into place. Computer scientist and philosopher Bernardo Kastrup laid out a case that consciousness is not something we possess one individual at a time, but rather something we and everything else are in. We are immersed in consciousness. The reality we experience is a mental process of the mind. The universal mind. Mind is all there is.

            Whoa, back up there. So he’s saying reality is just in our mind and that’s all there is? Something like that.

            How can that be you might ask?

What is Kastrup saying? What Kastrup is not saying is that the world, all the matter, all the things we see, feel, hear etc. etc. is just a product of our individual minds. Not at all. He’s not saying that reality ceases to exist beyond what we see and experience at any given time. He is saying that consciousness is something everything shares, that consciousness is everything, and that what we see as reality is an interpretation, a simulation of a reality we can comprehend - in order to survive.

            When we consider the world, indeed the universe, and we start to partition it into its constituent parts we have already started down the rabbit hole. The universe is one thing, not its parts. Without one part the rest doesn’t exist. The parts are simply an interpretation in our minds, all of which are useful in aiding our physical survival. Of course, in order to even process such bizarre notions, it becomes an endless chicken and egg exercise.

            If such a thing is true and consciousness is a shared thing rather than a uniquely individual phenomenon why can’t you read my mind, know what I’m thinking? According to Kastrup that’s where the brain comes in. The brain is our physical control center yes, but it also acts as the filter to cut off our consciousness agent from the larger mind. The term dissociative is used to describe this mechanism. Our individual brain dissociates us from the collective consciousness and each other. If it did not, we could not survive. Without this barrier it’s likely we would go insane. In fact, insanity might well be a defect in this dissociative mechanism. It makes some sense.

            What of other species? Is there an advantage for this level of dissociation in animals? Good question, perhaps not. There are all kinds of examples in the animal world of extraordinary communication that belies simple explanation, particularly in herding, flocking, schooling and insect behaviors. Creatures that do not thrive as individuals may have a limited consciousness or dissociative apparatus. The types of things we see in animal behaviors go beyond visual stimulus guiding the movement of thousands of individuals in such perfect synchronization.

            In higher order beings it’s not exactly clear where we order our movement and actions with conscious connections and where dissociation serves. When we sleep or are put under anesthesia our dissociative state is broken down and our minds are free to explore, re-join if you will, the collective consciousness. However, there is a fog around the sleep state and clearly around anesthetics so that we don’t remember it that well if at all. Still, many do remember their dreams in detail. Likewise, the anecdotal evidence for people being aware during surgery and during near death experiences is legend. Many other things can cause a breakdown of the dissociative state, or severely disable it. Drug use, alcohol use, mental illness, sexual ecstasy, meditation, thrill seeking and trauma of all sorts. In truth the dissociative state is our sanity and allows us to survive in this world as these biological beings.

            It seems to me that we humans desire, however sub-consciously, to be free of the dissociative state, to be one with the collective mind. There’s little doubt that mankind has tried to be free of the rigidity of sober reality and the weight of suffering since the beginning of time. Clearly this is true with alcohol, clearly… Same thing with drugs. DMT, a drug in the psychedelic category that users describe as altering reality in such profound and surprising detail to the point that it often changes their lives. Studies done with LSD and other psychedelic drugs show that despite people reporting massive visual activity and wildly heightened awareness their brain activity actually decreased when measured, shut down, much like during sleep or anesthesia. In other words when our brain activity decreases this dissociative state breaks down and we experience a reality that is quite different than our sober waking state. People will say they seek out and engage in reckless behaviors to feel something, to feel alive, as if the dissociative state is a repressive force that people intuitively resist in one way or another.

Mental illness, often thought to be a chemical imbalance can’t be ignored in the discussion of altered states of consciousness. One must consider that something has gone wrong with the normal functioning of the dissociative state. The condition called Dissociative Personality Disorder commonly known as multiple personality disorder, has shown to be invaluable in demonstrating the proclivity of brain activity to present differently for each alter personality. The study that Bernardo Kastrup relayed in the video was fascinating. The patient claimed to be blind in one of her alters despite there being nothing wrong with her sight in other personalities. Images of her brain while she was associated with the blind personality showed zero activity in the visual cortex with her eyes wide open - she was not faking it. This is a clear indication that dissociation can block a brain’s otherwise functional processes.

            Small children often say they see things or have imaginary friends or other seemingly fanciful experiences adults dismiss out of hand. But should we? The child’s brain is too underdeveloped to deal with survival and therefore potentially unconditioned to fully suppress/dissociate from the collective consciousness. Whatever these childhood experiences really are it is at least extremely interesting to contemplate in this light.

            What explains the eerie feeling of being watched only to turn around and find that you are being watched? Or for that matter the thought you have of a friend or colleague only to have that person call you in that minute. Had your minds reached through the collective consciousness and connected? We have a word for it: coincidence. That word always accompanies a mystery.

            If you truly think about your own mind with honesty, you realize that you don’t really control what you think or feel. You don’t even control what you like or don’t like. We are mystery to ourselves. Do you control the ideas that pop into your head? Do we control which people we are attracted to?  What is creativity? What is imagination? It’s as real as the chair you’re sitting in, but what is it made of? It’s a thought yes, but it’s so much more than that, a thought that spawns more thoughts… The crazy part is you don’t even control your next thought. What is self? It’s something we know instinctively, but do we even really know ourselves? Personally, all my life when I’d see myself in a mirror, I’d ask why am I stuck in that body? I feel like there is so much more, I’m so limited being trapped inside this body. Of course, the moment passes, and I get on with it, but the feeling recurs over and over and always with a bit of despair. 

 

The Materialists will dismiss all this as so much woo woo (the official term). They can explain hallucinations, near death experiences, drug induced phenomena, and other pyscho-physical phenomena by citing cellular mechanical/electro-chemical functions within the brain. A purely mechanistic explanation, no need for witchcraft or the spirit world.

But they are explaining apples with oranges. Science can’t explain experience or awareness. No mathematic equation can describe the taste of chocolate, the pain of loss of a loved one, the feeling we have when smelling lilacs, the melancholy of a rainy afternoon or the joy of love. Science can’t explain creativity, intuition, loneliness, rage or the transference of grief from one person to another without a word. Science can’t quantify honor, courage and sacrifice when acting on any of these could violate the prime directive: survival itself. These are experiences of the mind, qualia if you will.

Part III

It is the greatest mysteries in life that science hasn’t conquered. These are usually filed under the rubric of God only knows. Sometimes they are just unanswerable questions. Why is there something rather than nothing is one for the ages.

Dreams may be the one the best examples of experience of the mind we can all relate to. The experience of dreaming, where sub-conscious mentation creates a world from nothing that seems every bit as real as this one. We become totally immersed in the experience complete with emotions. We sometimes see, experience and encounter things, concepts in we have no waking knowledge of. How? Could it be that we tap into the larger consciousness when our dissociative guard is down?

Interestingly not all of our waking senses are engaged during the dream state. We see and hear, so to speak, but do we smell or feel touch? Rarely. I'm a vivid dreamer and rarely recall smell being invoked. The sense of taste and touch is also seemingly rare. I would speculate that since survival is usually not threatened during dreams these senses are just less important.

What of simultaneous invention? It brings to mind the famous quote by psychoanalyst Carl Jung: 'People don't have ideas. Ideas have people'. There are cases where people have had a revelation, invented a new device or method, or grasped a concept simultaneously on opposite sides of the world. Serendipity, coincidence maybe, but might there be a case for the collective consciousness connecting these thinkers via the larger mind?

Science has by and large dispensed with the wisdom of the ages. Tens of thousands of years of human thought and experience free of the noise of the modern world has been relegated to the realm of superstition or unenlightened ignorance. Yet the mysticism of Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism among others persists and is validated by experience to this day. These ideas and notions are nothing new. Eastern religions are based on them. The scientific enlightenment of the last few centuries has pushed them into the shadows of the modern age.

Consider that while they dig down into the minutiae of the quantum realm scientists continue to find something smaller and then something smaller still that makes up the parts of physical reality. Conversely cosmologists keep seeing farther and farther out as their observational tools advance. In both directions the observable fields act like Mandelbrot fractals, never ending patterns repeating themselves as they shrink or grow. It’s as if there is no bottom or pinnacle.

Interestingly when you see modern conceptual images of both the fabric of the universe and its filamentary connected stars and galaxies (as described by the plasma/electric universe) and the neural network inside our brains they look remarkably the same. It’s uncanny.

If consciousness is the basis of everything, this illusive theory of everything, what does it mean for us? What happens when we die? This is where I drew some comfort. If our brains are dissociating us from the greater mind, then when we die does our separated conscious agent re-join the collective? Well, it sounds somewhat like Heaven, don’t you think? Would we not be able to reconnect with loved ones that had previously passed - just like we are told about Heaven? The thing is, this concept leaves space for God, in fact, the whole thing seems like God to me.

So, I ponder… 

When Jesus said in the Lord’s Prayer “thy Kingdom come thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven” was he alluding to Heaven being right here on Earth, that they are connected? That when we die we go nowhere, we don't depart to a separate place, but rather just pierce the veil and join the greater consciousness? Are we separated from Heaven by this same dissociative barrier that separates us from each other? And what of Jesus? What was He? Was He a super-conscious being, human like us only fully connected to the larger consciousness, connected to God like He said He was? When He used the term “I am” to describe himself, was he alluding to His oneness with the greater mind, with God, with the universe itself? Was He able to heal through the power of a sub-conscious connection with the sick? It’s fascinating to consider.

The final question should be if it’s not: why? Why would our little slice of this greater consciousness be separated from ‘Heaven’ and each other? Maybe we’ll get to know when the time comes. Philosophers through the ages have often said life is suffering and clearly it is. Why should we suffer in this way, separated, alone? Is it that our individual conscious agent feeds the collective with our experiences? So that God can know himself… Perhaps our job is to find love and purpose amid the suffering. Perhaps suffering is the disease and love the cure.

Back to Earth…

Serious scientists like Kastrup, Tom Campbell, David Chalmers and Hoffman among others don’t go there, they don’t call it God, or allude to Heaven or Nirvana or whatever. But they don’t dismiss it out of hand. That attracts me to what they are positing so much more than atheistic scientists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennet and other Materialists, who, while fascinating in their own right, leave me depressed and cold. I plant my stake with the Idealists.

In the end what difference does it make which side you fall on? I think it makes a huge difference. In the Materialists view you have is this one life and then nothing. It’s essentially nihilism at its core. Nothing really matters, everything is meaningless. Those who are destined to suffer just suffer pointlessly. Life is unfair, cruel. What it is my friends is hopelessness… I don’t want to live without hope.