A Beginners Guide to Consciousness

“All reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one” – Albert Einstein

There is nothing as strange as reality. As an avid science fiction reader in my youth I would have categorically disagreed with this statement. The world was straightforward. If a tree fell in the forest and no-one was there to see it, it still made a sound. I was a devout atheist and I knew my house was made of solid matter and that my thoughts were a product of my brain.

This was half the reason I read about mind-bending realities and alien civilisations; to escape into strange lands and experience other-worldly entities through the minds of Philip K Dick, Iain M Banks and Dan Simmons et cetera.

This view on the world is easy. The world would exist whether or not humans were around to see it and the speed of light would remain the fastest constant in the universe. Simple.

It was with my father’s advice that would turn this view of reality upside down. Seeing I was interested in the weird and wonderful he advised that I do some reading into the clandestine world of quantum mechanics. This advice started me on a journey that blew my understanding of everything wide apart and led me to question absolutely everything I thought I knew.

In the words of the great American physicist, Richard Feynman – “If you think you understand quantum physics…… you don’t.”

The science of the very small has been an active and reputable pursuit for academics worldwide since the turn of the twentieth century. Back then, such powerhouses in theoretical physics such as Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein were contributing to what would be the most important breakthroughs in modern physics.

The beginners guide to the quantum world would display a few experimental results and explain the fundamentals of the subject. However, when I read a simple statement that disclosed that a particle can be in two places at the same time, I started paying attention. Read that again and really think about the ramifications.

The reader must keep in mind that all matter is built from atoms and atoms are built from particles. The same science also dictates that the universe is non-local. This means that to affect matter on one side of the galaxy will instantly affect matter millions of light years away on the other side of the galaxy. This drags us kicking and screaming into an interconnected universe, destroys light as the fastest speed and washes away the last remnants of Newtonian physics.

Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 states with beautiful simplicity that matter does not exist as we know it. All matter is energy vibrating at different rates. All the universe is energy, interwoven…… starting to get a bit weirder now?

Matter is an illusion. In fact, when physicists drilled down into what constitutes particles, they were shocked to find that nothing exists, no electrons, no neutrons and no protons. 99.9999% of all matter is empty space. All that exists are waves of energy that cannot be pinpointed to a specific location, just a probability of where they might be.

As I type this article, I am subject to a tiny viewpoint of ‘reality’ through my five physical senses. Photons bounce from the laptop and strike my retina. My retina converts the photon through an electrochemical reaction into a signal that travels down my optical nerve into the rear of my brain which, in under a tenth of a second, projects the image of my laptop in front of me. This sounds fairly straightforward but when analysed, we realise that the entire world we perceive through our human senses is nothing more than a hologram projected in our heads. The world is not ‘out there’, it is strictly speaking, inside our skull. In fact, our skulls are entirely dark. No light has, or can enter your brain. This highlights the aspect that as you read this, it is not light you are seeing, it is a hologram.

There is a famous laboratory experiment called ‘The Two Slit Experiment’ in quantum physics that shows us that our very act of observation changes reality. According to the results of this experiment, as conscious observers, we literally define reality. Now, this experiment is probably the most performed and least understood in our time and the underlying aspect that academia fail to recognise, the massive elephant in the room, is human consciousness.

And now we approach the mysterious land of metaphysics….

There are two main schools of thought when it comes to what our minds are. The first is called ‘materialism’. Materialists believe the mind is a construct of the brain and one is not separate of the other. The second is called ‘Dualism’. Dualists believe that the mind is separate from the brain and effectively uses the brain as a device to control the physical form of our body, as a child would use a remote control to guide his toy car.

Materialism made perfect sense until the advent of quantum physics, much to the dismay of Newtonianites the world over. The two slit experiment displays quite categorically that human consciousness affects our material world with no other interaction other than observation. This is irrefutable evidence that our minds act separate from the material world and ergo, our material brain. It shows that the material world is a construct of our mind rather than vice versa.

So, following on from this, we can take a look at our reality. Again, intrinsically linked with materialism and dualism, there are two main camps: the objective and subjective. The objective reality means that the tree still makes a sound when it falls regardless of an observer. The subjective means there is no tree unless someone has seen it.

There are studies which strongly suggest that we, as self-aware, conscious beings, affect reality in a collective manner. We process information and manifest our surroundings as the information is passed along a feedback loop to our reality. The entire existential philosophy is certain to confuse but is a study worth pursuing to delve deeper into our universe.

The studies of Carl Jung put into mainstream science the idea that all humans share a collective unconscious. This is that we are all connected in a metaphysical sense, our thoughts and experiences linked in a matrix of reality. This theory agrees with quantum physics and as more and more scientists realise that this aspect of study can no longer be swept under the carpet, the world is beginning to wake up to a new paradigm.

The ancient Mayans had a greeting – ‘In lak’esh ala’kin’ or ‘I am another you and you are another me’. This was to remind them that they are all part of the same consciousness and to harm another was to harm yourself. This is a philosophy of growth, not destruction. As a species we’d be better to look to the ancients for advice on the future and always question our reality. The moment we stop asking the big questions is the moment we stop living.

Have you ever contemplated your consciousness? Do you think it's a result of our brains or do you think our brains channel our consciousness?