W-wa Jeziorki: Consciousness, space and time

I believe that we are getting closer to a new paradigm that will completely overturn mankind's current views of both science and spirituality; a new way of looking at the Cosmos that will hopefully bring the two worldviews closer together.

In much the same way that the scientific method and rationalism replaced alchemy, the Hermetic tradition and Gnosticism as repositories of Western explanation of the physical worlds, the new paradigm will replace materialism as the dominant perspective.

Over the past three and half centuries, science has brought us great advancement in terms of technology and living standards. And yet it has failed to explain the spiritual world that so many of us intuitively feel. Not only has it failed to explain metaphysical phenomena, it actively states that they don't exist. For all its benefits, science hasn't (for example) explained the leap from non-life to life, or what happened before the Big Bang; or why the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate (dark matter and dark energy have had to be devised, neither of which have been observed); nor can it reconcile General Relativity with quantum mechanics. And above all, science cannot solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

There is a materialist-reductionist view of consciousness, that it's merely an emergent property of matter (atoms joined to form molecules, which formed proteins - life then (somehow) appears and evolves to become more and more complex, and in the most complex of brains - found only in Homo sapiens and perhaps a few more higher-order species - the phenomenon of consciousness eventually manifests itself - a product (presumably, again unproven by science) of neurons firing within the brain.

Today, a growing body of researchers and thinkers rejects this view, saying instead something that has hitherto been unthinkable - it is not consciousness that could not exist without space and time ('spacetime'), but it is spacetime that could not exist without consciousness. In other words, consciousness creates spacetime, and not the other way around.

Consider your experience of consciousness - it is a phenomenon central to the very essence of you being yourself. Materialism would say that such consciousness exists only within the skulls of sentient beings - and the only ones we know of in the entire Universe are on our planet.

Can you envisage consciousness (such as the very consciousness that you experience) as a property unique to eight billion people in a Universe that's 93 billion light years across? My intuition is that consciousness is everywhere, filling what we perceive to be spacetime.

But in what manner? Is consciousness granular, measured in discrete units down at the Planck level, a property of matter alongside mass, charge and spin, or is it even more fundamental than that - the ocean in which all matter swims, as it were? Are our individual consciousnesses nodes somehow connected in a Universal network, or web, or lattice, or grid?

Panpsychism - the notion that every thing is conscious - right down to the subatomic particle - is also gaining in popularity. I should say here 'returning to intellectual respectability', for panpsychism has a long tradition with roots in Ancient Greece, India and across the Far East.

More and more scientists and philosophers are prepared to step away from the old certainties of materialist reductionism. Central to materialist reductionism is the notion that matter - and only matter - exists in space and time, with consciousness is an illusionary epiphenomenon that somehow emerged from that matter.

But there is a long, long way to go before science, philosophy and religion get anywhere close to agreeing about the true nature of consciousness.

Two short videos with the (ever-sceptical) Robert Lawrence Kuhn - the first is with Harvard neurology professor, Rudolph Tanzi. The fact that this is a Harvard neurology professor speaking is mind-blowing.