It's when I was a kid I looked at my hands and said 'what am I?' I thought I might be my hands – that's what I seemed to use the most. But I knew it was my brain controlling my hands to do what I wanted them to. So, I reasoned, I must be my brain. But I knew even then how many functions of the body are controlled involuntarily by the brain, so the nearest I ever narrowed it down as a kid of about 10 was that I must be a small part of my brain.
Now I have a new theory.
I've known for years about the famous experiment where light behaves as both particles and waves at the same time. I read recently the addendum to that story – which I didn't fully know – of light being in two places at once when it behaves as a particle.
If you're a physicist, you'll know the experiment I mean. They shine light through a screen with two slits onto another screen behind it. It shows up as waves by a repeating pattern of stripes.
If you dim the light source down so far it only lets one photon through at a time, you can measure which slit the photon comes through by the position when it hits the backboard.
A more elaborate version of the same experiment yielded a startling result that seems to fly in the face of everything we think we know about matter – a single particle of light can move through both slits. The recording plate will in some way record that the photon has been in two places at once – until we observe the particle's position. As soon as we pinpoint the location of the photon in space after it having come through both slits, the effects of it going through the other slit disappear.
That's not exactly the scenario but in a nutshell, the crux is that something (a photon, in this case) can have two different sets of properties, even exist in two places at once – until we pinpoint its position by looking for it, whereupon the other position ceases to be.
The question is, has that particle existed in two places up until the point of observation by some magic of physics, or do we, by observing it, bring the photon into existence?
What else is like that in the universe? What familiar thing can have two different properties until we bring it into existence by manifesting it? Easy – we're surrounded by them every day.
Thoughts.
If the doorbell rings or we hear a noise on the roof, we have two choices. Get up to answer it or investigate, or ignore it and keep reading or watching TV. Both choices are real. Both scenarios have the motive (for want of a better word) to exist, because we can choose either one. Both concepts exist – for the pure reason that if one didn't exist, it wouldn't strike us as an option.
Something can exist in our mind before it comes to fruition in reality. We think both paths, both realities until we make one real. Only when we ignore the sound or get up to answer the door has the die been cast in the universe and an action has been called into being by the choice between two notions, two possible modes of existence, two possible universes.
How are thoughts related to photons of light, you may ask? What is it that gives us two options when we hear the doorbell? What gives us the power to choose one path of action or another? What is it that even allows us to know the doorbell has sounded?
Consciousness.
Consciousness is a constant and total process of input from our environment, action carried out in reaction to it, and which affects it in turn.
We think of our brains as having this mysterious quality of consciousness and the rest of the universe having quantum mechanics, gravity, electromagnetic forces etc. As science has advanced, the consciousness, soul, spirit or personality has retreated to smaller physical locations inside us until modern medicine has banished it from the human body altogether (there's nowhere mysterious for it to live now we have a good idea what each organ is for). But it exists somewhere, presumably in our brain. Is it a gland? A single neuron? A combination of cells?
What if consciousness, the perception of reality and the possibilities of realities yet to come, is a fundamental quality in the universe – a field, much like gravity?
What if it's a field that can be expressed mathematically the same as nuclear fusion, one we simply haven't detected or identified yet. There's dark matter, anti-matter, all kinds of strange fields of particles in the universe. Actual matter – the sort we're used to – only amounts to four percent of the mass in the observable universe. Couldn't one of these strange fields we've detected but can't identify be consciousness?
I know it sounds like I'm being spiritual and invoking the Gaia spirit, but I'm speaking pure science. What if consciousness is a stream of particles like neutrinos that can exist in a tiny packet, not just in complicated organisms like us? What if the most basic effect of consciousness on the universe is to call into existence a state of being? The light exists in two places at once before we observe it – just like what we're going to do about the doorbell exists in two states in our mind before we act on it. Neither state is a reality yet, but they both exist as concepts or possible futures.
Might a human being simply be a biological organism that amasses a state of complexity such that it has a strong exertion on the field of consciousness in the cosmos, resulting in that organism being aware of its surroundings?
As the owner of a body, you and I are chemically no different than a rock, a telephone or a star. We're all made up of exactly the same stuff, just put together in different configurations.
There might be no magic quality we call 'life' – it just might be a system complicated enough to use the field of consciousness to bring complex possibilities into existence – more complicated than where a photon will reveal itself. Paul Davies said in Are We Alone? that life might be no more than a level of complexity. Life might just be a term we made up to label systems of enormous complexity that change faster than most processes in the universe (and manifest in reproduction, growth, the concepts of nourishment and waste etc).
We're too used in the world to feeling like we have this strip of flesh, inside it lives a soul, and everything else in the universe is governed by minute, arbitrary processes that affect us little.
The biochemistry and atomic behaviour inside our bodies is exactly the same everywhere in the universe. We're a spot of atoms crowded together more than they are in another spot. Our physical body could disintegrate at any second given the right circumstances in our region of space. What we are, however, is our consciousness. And just like our body is the melding of atoms in an endless ocean of them, our mind might be a bunching together in the particle ocean of consciousness.
So life might well have been inevitable, and a small clump of the ability to make choices in a loose collection of carbon and water molecules might be all life is
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