6 replies to this topic

[kevin]

The interview places consciousness as transcending the material world rather than as it's product and the idea seems to sit well with the results of quantum physics.
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The Self-Aware Universe

An Interview with Amit Goswami
[Abridged]
by Craig Hamilton - What is Enlightment?

WIE: In your book The Self-Aware Universe you speak about the need for a paradigm shift. Could you talk a bit about how you conceive of that shift? From what to what?

Amit Goswami: The current worldview has it that everything is made of matter, and everything can be reduced to the elementary particles of matter, the basic constituents—building blocks—of matter. And cause arises from the interactions of these basic building blocks or elementary particles; elementary particles make atoms, atoms make molecules, molecules make cells, and cells make brain. But all the way, the ultimate cause is always the interactions between the elementary particles. This is the belief—all cause moves from the elementary particles. This is what we call "upward causation." So in this view, what human beings—you and I—think of as our free will does not really exist. It is only an epiphenomenon or secondary phenomenon, secondary to the causal power of matter. And any causal power that we seem to be able to exert on matter is just an illusion. This is the current paradigm.

Now, the opposite view is that everything starts with consciousness.That is, consciousness is the ground of all being. In this view, consciousness imposes "downward causation." In other words, our free will is real. When we act in the world we really are acting with causal power. This view does not deny that matter also has causal potency—it does not deny that there is causal power from elementary particles upward, so there is upward causation—but in addition it insists that there is also downward causation. It shows up in our creativity and acts of free will, or when we make moral decisions. In those occasions we are actually witnessing downward causation by consciousness.

WIE: In your book you refer to this new paradigm as "monistic idealism." And you also suggest that science seems to be verifying what a lot of mystics have said throughout history—that science's current findings seem to be parallel to the essence of the perennial spiritual teaching.

AG: It is the spiritual teaching. It is not just parallel. The idea that consciousness is the ground of being is the basis of all spiritual traditions, as it is for the philosophy of monistic idealism—although I have given it a somewhat new name. The reason for my choice of the name is that, in the West, there is a philosophy called "idealism" which is opposed to the philosophy of "material realism," which holds that only matter is real. Idealism says no, consciousness is the only real thing. But in the West that kind of idealism has usually meant something that is really dualism—that is, consciousness and matter are separate. So, by monistic idealism, I made it clear that, no, I don't mean that dualistic kind of Western idealism, but really a monistic idealism, which has existed in the West, but only in the esoteric spiritual traditions. Whereas in the East this is the mainstream philosophy. In Buddhism, or in Hinduism where it is called Vedanta, or in Taoism, this is the philosophy of everyone. But in the West this is a very esoteric tradition, only known and adhered to by very astute philosophers, the people who have really delved deeply into the nature of reality.

WIE: What you are saying is that modern science, from a completely different angle—not assuming anything about the existence of a spiritual dimension of life—has somehow come back around, and is finding itself in agreement with that view as a result of its own discoveries.

AG: That's right. And this is not entirely unexpected. Starting from the beginning of quantum physics, which began in the year 1900 and then became full-fledged in 1925 when the equations of quantum mechanics were discovered, quantum physics has given us indications that the worldview might change. Staunch materialist physicists have loved to compare the classical worldview and the quantum worldview. Of course, they wouldn't go so far as to abandon the idea that there is only upward causation and that matter is supreme, but the fact remains that they saw in quantum physics some great paradigm changing potential. And then what happened was that, starting in 1982, results started coming in from laboratory experiments in physics. That is the year when, in France, Alain Aspect and his collaborators performed the great experiment that conclusively established the veracity of the spiritual notions, and particularly the notion of transcendence. Should I go into a little bit of detail about Aspect's experiment?

WIE: Yes, please do.

AG: To give a little background, what had been happening was that for many years quantum physics had been giving indications that there are levels of reality other than the material level. How it started happening first was that quantum objects—objects in quantum physics—began to be looked upon as waves of possibility. Now, initially people thought, "Oh, they are just like regular waves." But very soon it was found out that, no, they are not waves in space and time. They cannot be called waves in space and time at all—they have properties which do not jibe with those of ordinary waves. So they began to be recognized as waves in potential, waves of possibility, and the potential was recognized as transcendent, beyond matter somehow.
But the fact that there is transcendent potential was not very clear for a long time. Then Aspect's experiment verified that this is not just theory, there really is transcendent potential, objects really do have connections outside of space and time—outside of space and time! What happens in this experiment is that an atom emits two quanta of light, called photons, going opposite ways, and somehow these photons affect one another's behavior at a distance, without exchanging any signals through space. Notice that: without exchanging any signals through space but instantly affecting each other. Instantaneously.
Now Einstein showed long ago that two objects can never affect each other instantly in space and time because everything must travel with a maximum speed limit, and that speed limit is the speed of light. So any influence must travel, if it travels through space, taking a finite time. This is called the idea of "locality." Every signal is supposed to be local in the sense that it must take a finite time to travel through space. And yet, Aspect's photons—the photons emitted by the atom in Aspect's experiment—influence one another, at a distance, without exchanging signals because they are doing it instantaneously—they are doing it faster than the speed of light. And therefore it follows that the influence could not have traveled through space. Instead the influence must belong to a domain of reality that we must recognize as the transcendent domain of reality.

Link to Complete Article

Edited by kevin, 06 September 2003 - 04:16 PM.

[Cyto]

So although it's more apparent for photons, for electrons, for the submicroscopic objects, our belief is that all reality,all manifest reality, all matter, is governed by the same laws. And if that is so, then this experiment is telling us that we should change our worldview because we, too, are quantum objects.

I disagree, we have known that the current laws that govern matter does not always follow suit. One example is the below quote.

Interestingly, the rotor does not continue spinning for long once the electricity is turned off. It is so small that it has little inertia, so any tiny electric charges remaining on the device after it's turned off tend to stop the rotor immediately.

"The nanoworld is weird - different things dominate," Zettl said. "Gravity plays no role whatsoever and inertial effects are basically nonexistent because things are just so small, so that little things like residual electric fields can play a dominant role. It's counter intuitive."
Nano-motor

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It was my good fortune to recognize it within quantum physics, to recognize that all the paradoxes of quantum physics can be solved if we accept consciousness as the ground of being. So that was my unique contribution and, of course, this has paradigm-shifting potential because now we can truly integrate science and spirituality.

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AG: There are people who are now coming out and recognizing the same thing, that this view is the correct way to go to explain quantum physics and also to develop science in the future. In other words, the present science has shown not only quantum paradoxes but also has shown real incompetence in explaining paradoxical and anomalous phenomena, such as parapsychology, the paranormal—even creativity. And even traditional subjects, like perception or biological evolution, have much to explain that these materialist theories don't explain. To give you one example, in biology there is what is called the theory of punctuated equilibrium. What that means is that evolution is not only slow, as Darwin perceived, but there are also rapid epochs of evolution, which are called "punctuation marks." But traditional biology has no explanation for this.
However, if we do science on the basis of consciousness, on the primacy of consciousness, then we can see in this phenomenon creativity, real creativity of consciousness. In other words, we can truly see that consciousness is operating creatively even in biology, even in the evolution of species. And so we can now fill up these gaps that conventional biology cannot explain with ideas which are essentially spiritual ideas, such as consciousness as the creator of the world.

This is as far as I go, I'm tired of this new attempt to integrate 'just enough science to make religion sound right.'

Since we don't understand the force behind the photo elements that means that science has to integrate with religion stuffs. I can't speculate at what this could be because I'm not a particle physicist. I do however have a quick story: there once was the crazy idea that biological compounds held a vitae of life that 'couldn't be recreated by man' until urea was made in the lab. Of course the vitae people said that the lab prof's vitae must of contaminated the mix for the biological compound.

As for bashing evolution and saying that its ruled by a (vague & ambiguous) consciousness is just mean. And PE does have models which support quick alterations, this doesn't of course happen the same in all biological organisms. His use of god-of-the-gaps in evolution is the same as he used in the photon oddities. Abiogenesis and evolution have the MOST evidence for being feasible in both generating life and alterations thus-far. The god-of-the-gaps will not work forever.

[kevin]

While he is certainly coming at it from a 'spiritual' angle, the take home message for me is that rather than trying to explain consciousness through material reality, we might be better off trying to explain reality through consciousness.

Just because his suggestions align themselves with all major religions, including philosphies of pantheism and buddhism, should not be reason to dismiss them out of hand.

Information is being shown to be at least as important as matter/energy/time in describing the universe. Information on the state of a particle is what is instantaneously transmitted between entangled particles at the atomic level and 'photon oddities' have been shown in different experiments with various particles. Most recently in this months nature it has been demonstrated to exist in this months issue of nature.

'Transmission of information' that transcends the 'locality' that Einstein says must exist, ie. that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, indicates to me that there must be SOMETHING going on at a different level.

'Transmission of information' that results in an outcome seems to me to be enough like 'something making a decision' to warrant entertaining the possibility that there is something that is 'consicious' albeit not in the way we understand consciousness.

I undertstand the prejuidices against religion quite well, as I only have to turn on the TV and watch another evangelist espousing yet again that THEY KNOW what is RIGHT.. to realize how a philosophy meant to explain existence is perverted by our species to other ends.

I am NOT 'religious' by any definition, but I am open to the idea that we have a long way to go in explaining reality and the universe and that the explanation might just involve the existence of 'something conscious', beyond our understanding as yet, which influences our reality. Whether it is a self-referential rule or imperative, or an 'actual conscious being' as we understand 'beings', is totally unknown. To rule out the possibility of its' existence, something many physicists tried prove but have been unable to thus far, is to forgo the opportunity for the further development of techniques which can test this hypothesis. If people aren't looking in this direction, it will be difficult to tell if this may be a plausible way to go.

[kevin]

Here's a quote from the website of Richard Dolan who takes some of the concepts of Goswami and places them in a more mathematical form. (bolding is mine) The mathematics on the site are far from proof of his assertions but he does offer a paper which are a little more rigourous in their explanation.

Whether there exists some reality, independent of man, that is responsible for the regularities observable in the universe, and if there is such an independent reality, what is its nature, are questions that have occupied philosophers, theologians, and scientists throughout history. In particular, whether such a reality can be found in the physical universe has seemed more and more to require a negative answer, as relativity, quantum theory, and the violation of Bell's inequalities, all verified by experiment, have made it difficult to defend any concept of an independent physical reality.

This paper and a companion paper present, respectively, the metaphysics and physics of a model of the universe based on a nonphysical independent reality. This reality can be described mathematically and the universe can be shown to be a natural consequence of it. Nonlocality, relativity, and uncertainty are inherent in this universe. And it begins with a "big bang."

The model presented in this paper is based on quantum mechanics, but it is not a new interpretation of quantum mechanics in the sense of the Copenhagen interpretation. What is presented here is a model of ultimate reality. In it, one can see the origins of the various interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Many physicists, having reached the limits of current theories without pinning down an ultimate physical reality, have speculated that the universe may turn out to be a colossal consciousness. Having said that, however, they forget about it, since no one knows how to deal with such a concept. Scientific attempts to deal with consciousness are almost all based on the premise that it is simply a pattern of electrical activity in the brain. This turns out to be only part of the story. Amit Goswami, in his book The Self-Aware Universe,[1] shows that consciousness must be the basic stuff of the universe and that recognizing this fact makes it possible to explain nonlocality and other puzzles of quantum physics. While in my view his theory is basically correct, his approach is philosophical rather than mathematical or physical.

Pure Consciousness Model of the Universe
Companion Paper

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The above work by Dolan reminds me of another paper, called

The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: a New Kind of Reality Theory or CTMU by Christopher Michael Langan

Introduction

Among the most exciting recent developments in science are Complexity Theory, the theory of
self-organizing systems, and the modern incarnation of Intelligent Design Theory, which
investigates the deep relationship between self-organization and evolutionary biology in a
scientific context not preemptively closed to teleological causation. Bucking the traditional
physical reductionism of the hard sciences, complexity theory has given rise to a new trend,
informational reductionism, which holds that the basis of reality is not matter and energy, but
information. Unfortunately, this new form of reductionism is as problematic as the old one. As
mathematician David Berlinski writes regarding the material and informational aspects of DNA:
“We quite know what DNA is: it is a macromolecule and so a material object. We quite know
what it achieves: apparently everything. Are the two sides of this equation in balance?” More
generally, Berlinski observes that since the information embodied in a string of DNA or protein
cannot affect the material dynamic of reality without being read by a material transducer,
information is meaningless without matter.1

The relationship between physical and informational reductionism is a telling one, for it directly
mirrors Cartesian mind-matter dualism, the source of several centuries of philosophical and
scientific controversy regarding the nature of deep reality.2 As long as matter and information
remain separate, with specialists treating one as primary while tacitly relegating the other to
secondary status, dualism remains in effect. To this extent, history is merely repeating itself;
where mind and matter once vied with each other for primary status, concrete matter now vies
with abstract information abstractly representing matter and its extended relationships. But while
the formal abstractness and concrete descriptiveness of information seem to make it a worthy
compromise between mind and matter, Berlinski’s comment demonstrates its inadequacy as a
conceptual substitute. What is now required is thus what has been required all along: a
conceptual framework in which the relationship between mind and matter, cognition and
information, is made explicit. This framework must not only permit the completion of the gradual
ongoing dissolution of the Cartesian mind-matter divider, but the construction of a footworthy
logical bridge across the resulting explanatory gap.

I don't pretend to understand everything that any of these papers suggest, but I do have enough of a grasp of the concepts to see the validity in keeping an open mind to their plausibility. I have to say as well, that although it would be psychically comforting to think that there was something larger than ourselves somehow running things or even just 'in on the game', I am quite open to the possibility that no such thing exists. I just believe however, that the above bears thinking about.

[Mind]

The "consciousness is the only reality" theory raises interesting questions for me.

Do we create/change the universe as we go along? That is, in the article, AG states that the whole universe, with all its history was once just possibility. Then, when the possibility of consciousness arrived the universe came to be physically (ie. there was one giant quantum wave-function collapse into what we see as the universe today). Now, I can certainly see us creating/changing the universe as we go along in our own local corner. If there is free will, then we change things as we see fit and the "look" of the earth changes with our choices. This is obvious if you believe in free-will. No what about this...Can we change the part of the universe that is non-local in the material realm? If consciousness is transcendental then all the universe should conform to our ideas. Was the earth really at the center of the universe with layers of crystal shells rotating around it back when that was the acepted theory? Did Copernicus see a different universe and really physically change its nature by disseminating this theory to other conscious minds?

Ok, I know this all sounds meta-physical/mystical and stuff, but if we are going to entertain the theory promoted by AG then we must answer these types of questions.

By the way, I am more of the materialist type of thinker, but I am willing to entertain new ideas.

[kevin]

Mind: The Book the Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, suggests exactly what you mention, that as we 'make' new 'discoveries' by taking measurements, we influence and create the very outcomes we are measuring, the laws of physics change, and because the new theories are always backwards compatible, we can't tell the difference. A great book that I've got to dig up and read again..

I'm partial to the theory myself but would have to say that our future choices are affected by our past history and there is only a certain 'range' of possibilities to 'choose' from that don't violate the choices we have already made. I wonder if we aren't painting ourselves into some kind of universal cosmological corner.

[kevin]

The post below is also found at http://www.imminst.o...t=0 and should probably exist here as it deals with similar concepts.

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In one of the more recent active exchanges in the thread Naturalistic Spirituality & Increasing Complexity, Split from Ken Wilber thread, the discussion of reality as being a self-perpetuating sel-organizing pattern of increasing complexity, brought many interesting comments on the possiblity of the existence of 'god' and the nature of reality itself.

In this article from the July issue of Scientific American I was pleased by the synchronicity presented to me by the presence of an article which dealt with two kinds of entropy. The one described by the classical Second Law of Thermodynamics (the disorder in a physical system) and another kind of measure of disorder or perhaps more appropriately, order, in an information system, called Shannon entropy after the mathematician who formulated it in 1948.

Though certainly no physicist, I found the article to be a provocative glimpse at how changing perspectives are giving way to a new way of thinking about the nature of reality.

From the beginning of the article some thoughts which echo those given in the above thread..

Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are likely to be told "matter and energy."
Yet if we have learned anything from engineering, biology and physics, information is just as crucial an ingredient. The robot at the automobile factory is supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell's nucleus. Likewise, a century of developments in physics has taught us that information is a crucial player in physical systems and processes. Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, is to regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals.

and from the conclusion...

Holography may be a guide to a better theory. What is the fundamental theory like? The chain of reasoning involving holography suggests to some, notably Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, that such a final theory must be concerned not with fields, not even with spacetime, but rather with information exchange among physical processes. If so, the vision of information as the stuff the world is made of will have found a worthy embodiment.

go here...Information in the Holographic Universe... to get all the good stuff in between.

As an afterthought... doesn't this all sound suspiciously like a modern movie plot?

More afterthoughts... If we are just projections from another universe with different physical laws and dimensions, where did that universe come from and can our own holographically projected universe form the basis of another further on... 'further on' of course probably being meaningless in this case. Can we ascertain the fundamental informational pattern from which our universe is derived and manipulate the pattern/change the code and thus alter reality? What brings our reality into being and serves as the energy source for the 'holographic projection' of our universe?

hmmmmm.....