Hello there! I find it interesting now and then to entertain the kind of ideas you pose in this article. Although I agree that consciousness is an intriguing and poorly understood phenomenon, I wouldn't go so far as to put it at the center of the universe, which seems to be just a recycled version of an anthropocentric conception of the world.
I don't think ideas are born out of nothingness. We form ideas based on experiences, how we interpret them and how we connect them among each other. To propose that it's the other way around seems to be completely unsubstantiated. There is a subjective dimension to how we represent our experiences within our minds, but there are also many ways in which we can access objective features of reality. Is it an illusion that if I have an apple and you give me another apple, I will have two apples in the end? Is it an illusion that, each time I release a massive object midair, it falls down? Is my mind creating these regularities? If so, where is it creating them from? How is it that every single consciousness perceives these same regularities?
You've written a statement which I'm having trouble understanding, and I quote:
Spirituality has always claimed that there is a larger reality that is more fundamental than the material world, and that it has something to do with consciousness. Quantum physics is coming to the same conclusion that reality is governed by probability waves or information.
On which basis do you say that the conclusions of spiritual traditions and quantum mechanics are the same? There is no larger reality in the case of quantum mechanics, it's the same reality, only at a smaller scale and following a probabilistic causality. It is not metaphysical, it is as much as physical as the moons of Jupiter. Spiritual traditions, on the other hand, usually speak of transcendent realms and hypothetical dimensions separated from the physical world. These do not seem the same thing to me.
I would also like to remark that, while the idea of us having five classical senses remains very popular, the actual number of physical senses is somewhere around 10 and 20, depending on the details of the definition of sense. This is just a curiosity, not a criticism. You might like to check it out.
For me, the greatest indication of the existence of a physical objective reality instead of just a mental construct is the fact that almost all observers tend to agree in their sensory observations, even if each may represent these observations subjectively in their minds. I release a massive object midair and not a single person will tell me that it is going upwards to the sky. Everyone, with their sensory systems, agree on the behavior of that object. Are they incidentally creating the same illusion, or are they manifesting an objective feature of the world? The former seems too arbitrary to be plausible.
Interesting comment @jmorais! First thanks for reading the post. It is indeed hard to express the nuances of consciousness, reality and perception in words. I am also used to critique so thanks for sharing your comments. Do not believe or disbelieve what you read here, simply take it as information.
The main idea is that consciousness if the fundamental fabric of all experience. Matter is secondary but that does not mean that matter is not real or that it's an illusion (if you jump off a cliff, yes you will fall according to the physical laws that we have approximated), its just not the fundamental stuff our experience is made of. It is difficult to express in words as consciousness is purely subjective and this shift in perspective can only occur with deep introspection within our own conscisousness. All experiences are in the mind or consciousness, thus to understand it we must not only look without but also within.
I agree with your point. It is funny that we all have separate minds yet how is it that we are creating the same reality? Writing a theory with 7 billion observers can be quite dicey indeed. Perhaps our minds are singular. There are many scientists and spiritualists that made this claim based on first-hand experiences including Bohr and Schrodinger. It is all one. Connected non-locally underneath the table. Separateness is a mind-construct and things appear separate out there but it’s all connected in there.
When I referred to quantum mechanics I was simply hinting towards the measurement paradox, the observer effect, the double slit experiment and all its variations, quantum entanglement and the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox, Bell's theorem and more which I will write about in future posts... Quantum mechanics is the koan of our times perhaps suggesting that we must re-evaluate the assumptions we make in current theories. Paradoxes are signs that the current paradigm is starting to fail, which is a good thing. It means we are evolving and waking up to this reality. We have so much more to learn. We used to think Earth was flat not long ago. Perhaps some assumptions we make today will seem oblivious in the next decades.
I like this. Critical thinking. Thanks for dropping by and always share your thoughts. 💭
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Thank you for your kind answer. You come across as someone who enjoys a debate and who can put their ideas in a sensible form. There are several aspects of your original post which I can agree with. My issue is precisely with this idea that
This kind of idealist philosophy could never really convince me. Would you say that when I'm not looking at the moon, it isn't actually there? Or are you trying to say that all my perceptions of the moon are merely a product of my mind and do not bear any relation to objective physical data which my senses are able to collect? What about my perception of another consciousness? Is that other consciousness just a construct inside mine? What is my consciousness to that other one, then? I'd like to see you elaborate clearly on this idea that consciousness is primary and matter is secondary, maybe in a next article.
Regarding your mention of quantum mechanics, the only real conceptual difficulty right now is probably the wavefunction collapse, which is related to the measurement problem. The observer effect is a misnomer for this phenomenon, because it is not the conscious observer which collapses the wavefunction, but the interaction between the quantum object and the measuring apparatus. The double-slit experiment is completely consistent with quantum mechanics and does not represent any paradox, and neither does quantum entanglement; those are strange phenomena from a classical point of view, but very well described within quantum mechanics, and consistent with the rest of its theoretical and phenomenological body. The EPR paradox has never been seen as a real paradox by many quantum physicists, most notably Niels Bohr who explained from the beginning that no contradiction arose between quantum entanglement and the speed limit at which information can travel. Bell's theorem is just an expression of the degree of non-local correlations between quantum objects, and does not represent a paradox. It is as paradoxical as the concept of an action at a distance when Newton proposed his theory of gravitation or the concept of a force field as introduced by Faraday in the context of electromagnetism.
Now, quantum mechanics is firmly based on careful and repeatable observations, while idealist ideas are a metaphysical conception which is either based on tautological reasoning or simply impossible to test. I don't think it is fair to compare the two. Nothing in quantum mechanics or in the empirical experience that is available to us supports the idea of matter as being subservient to consciousness.
Nevertheless, don't be discouraged from my skepticism. Put forward your best ideas in the clearest way that you can and with the soundest justification as you can. Then, this debate will be ever more interesting.
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