Oh boy! Here goes. I know that very
few of you are going to find this interesting but if there is one
more person among my friends who finds this absolutely mind-boggling
it will be well worth it. Anyway I'm going to have fun taking a run
at it.
QUESTION: Does consciousness create
reality?
I'm not going to make any attempt to be
inclusive. If I did there would be no way I could present it as an
essay. Further more, if I could, I'd be teaching philosophy at NYU
or Pitt (the top two universities in the world for philosophy
according to QS
World University Rankings by Subject 2015). So let's just go with it,
have a good time, and lay the foundation for some rather hard
questions.
Where
did I come up with such a question? Some of you are aware that I
have been doing a lot of reading in quantum physics over the past
three years and Buddhist philosophy and psychology for many more
years. When these two subjects collided in recent books I've been
reading (1) there was no avoiding this question.
The
Nobel Laureate in physics, Richard Feynman, is credited with saying
"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't
understand quantum mechanics." Now I don't believe that we can
logically deduce that if you don't think you understand quantum
mechanics, you must understand it. So I just have to say that I'm
absolutely fascinated by quantum theory and about the time I think I
actually understand, or something actually seems to make sense, I
realize that I really have no idea. Bummer! But it sure gives your
brain a good work-out, and researchers say that that's important to
give your brain a good work-out when you get older. Feynman also
explained why I'm so attracted to these two subjects - "Physics
is like sex. Sure you can get some interesting results, but that's
not why we do it."
The
concept of consciousness creating reality is unbelievably intriguing
for me. Just think about the power of your brain changing reality.
One thing which I do think I understand about quantum physics is that
the location of a particle is but a potential - it might be any
number of places at the same time - which is not known until it is
observed and/or measured. You can see that it is a simple step from
this to the creation of reality. But two problems immediately raise
their ugly heads - both definitions. No matter where we might go or
want to go with the quantum physics and Buddhist philosophy we're not
getting anywhere without being able to define consciousness and
reality.
I
almost hate to bring it up but if we can't define consciousness and
reality we can't answer our question.
From
my brief research I have found that most academics believe that we
don't have a truly operational definition of consciousness. That
doesn't bode well for this monogram. But I haven't come this far to
turn back now. Besides I've got some really good points to make even
if they don't answer the question.
The
first modern attempt at defining consciousness came from Rene
Descartes who wrote during the first half of the 17th century and is
often called 'the father of modern western philosophy'. He kept it
simple "cogito ergo sum" or "I think, therefore I
am". This was definitely a philosophical argument. Psychology
didn't come along for over 200 years. Wilhelm Wundt, who opened the
first laboratory in Leipzig, Germany in 1879, is considered the
'father of psychology'.
About
that time, in the United States, William James, a philosopher,
psychologist and physician, offered the first course in psychology
and became a major influence in the field. Early
psychologists studying consciousness were called Structuralists. They
used a process known as introspection to study conscious sensations,
thoughts and experiences. Psychologist William James defined
consciousness as the "function of knowing". He "considered
consciousness a tool which, by its nature, is selective, fluid and
personal - a tool founded upon logic which serves to create an inner
coherent reality." (2) He saw consciousness as, to use a more
modern term, streaming. For him consciousness is a continuous
succession of experiences whose primary purpose was to decide to what
we pay attention. "James saw the stream of consciousness as an
unending parade of thoughts, feelings, images, ideas, sensations,
conceptions, emotions, etc, that appear before our conscious
awareness and then pass away." (3) More modern thinking sees
consciousness as the individual's awareness of their own internal
states as well as the events going on around them.
It
is interesting, before we move on from William James, to note that
James once said, "Believe
that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact."
Quantum mechanics was just beginning at the end of his life. Could
he have thought about consciousness creating reality?
In
Buddhism we often speak of meditation where we watch life events go
by like a river very much like James' flow of consciousness. That is
to make the point that they are gone and will never return. At the
same time you will find Buddhist teachers speaking of life as
snippets which can be observed and studied. This doesn't cause any
problems if we think of the snippets as flowing together like a movie
film. For those of you too young to remember when movies were on
film, the movie was actually a string of individual pictures.
So
have we or can we define consciousness? I again turn to the wisdom
of Richard
Feynman, who said about scientific enquiry
"First
you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step." In
other words, I don't think we can identify an operational definition
upon which everyone would agree. As a result, I'm going to guess.
Based upon my personal perception, gut reactions to what I've read,
and my own philosophical analysis, I'm going to use the more modern
thinking with a sprinkle of William James. I am going to have our
operational definition be:
Consciousness
=df the individual's awareness of their own internal states; as
manifest by the unending parade of thoughts, feelings, images, ideas,
sensations, conceptions, emotions, etc.; along with the events going
on around them.
Now
let's turn to the definition of reality. The most common definition
is that reality is "the state of things as they actually exist
rather than as they may appear or might be imagined." We could
push this to the point of including everything that has existed,
exists or will exist. I'm not sure I want to do that because the
initial definition is insufficient. It actually requires a definition
for the word 'exist', and of what 'state' are we talking?
There
are those who would question the existence of anything and argue that
something exists only in our minds; viz. that everything we see,
hear, feel, taste, and touch are illusions. There are those who
would go as far as to argue that we are all a part of one
consciousness that creates the illusion of existence. Wait a minute!
That's sounds very much like our original question. Are we getting
ourselves into a circular argument. (I'm terrified that is what is
going to happen!) The fact that identifying the existence of
something is dependent upon our brains is something I have in my
outline for much later in the monogram. Suffice it to say, to accept
this definition of reality we must accept that there are things that
actually exist and there are things that we only imagine that exist.
New
Scientist points out that this definition, which depends upon our
senses, totally ignores "such problematic entities as electrons,
the recession and the number 5, which we cannot sense but which are
very real. It also ignores phantom limbs and illusory smells. Both
can appear vividly real, but we would like to say that these are not
part of reality. We could tweak the definition by equating reality
with what appears to a sufficiently large group of people, thereby
ruling out subjective hallucinations. . . . Just because sufficiently
many people believe in something does not make it real." (4)
This
really puts the screws to us as pertaining to the definition of
reality. There are billions of people on the earth who believe that
there is a god - a supreme creator who, to some, is also a
micro-manager. Because there are billions does not make god real.
After all, the same organization that insists upon the reality of a
god is the organization that had all of Europe believing that the
world was not only the center of the universe but flat. Giordano
Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600 for claiming that the
earth was just a planet that circles the sun in a much larger
universe. Not too many years later Galileo Galilei (known to most
students simply as Galileo) was put under house arrest for arriving
at the same conclusions. So obviously reality is not determined by
the number of people who believe something is real. I would say that
there is no scientific or social evidence that god exists. That
doesn't make my opinion real either because I don't have any hard
evidence that god doesn't exist. Prove that the number 5 really
exists. Have I muddied things up enough?
Okay,
so I don't want to give up on the question just because I can't come
up with adequately accurate and/or acceptable definitions. So I seem
to be pushed clear back to the first simplistic definition; viz. "the
state of things as they actually exist rather than as they may appear
or might be imagined." I do this because in its almost naive
simplicity it allows for "things" such as the number 5. It
assumes that there are things which exist. To quote Star Trek's
erudite science officer, Spock, "nothing unreal exists."
(5)
Does
consciousness create reality? Now the fun begins. Let's talk about
quantum physics - also called quantum mechanics or quantum theory.
The famous physicist, Niels Bohr said "Anyone who is not shocked
by quantum theory has not understood it." (6) But we must push
on.
First,
let's consider what I consider to be a basic fundamental of quantum
theory, remembering that this is just my understanding. Consider a
photon. It can be a wave, having both wave-like properties as well
as the single position and size associated with a particle. Since the
wave doesn't stop at a finite distance from its peak, it goes on to
infinity. This means that the photon has an infinite possible number
of locations to be observed. As soon as we observe the photon it is
a particle. (7) You don't know where it is until you observe it.
Thus we have a paradox which Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrödinger,
explained in 1935 by his famous Schrödinger's Cat thought
experiment. Remember, this is a "thought" experiment and
so no cat was harmed or not harmed. Consider a cat in a box. Also in
the box is a Geiger counter, a small amount of radioactive material
and a vial of hydrocyanic acid. The radioactive material is so small
that, in the course of an hour, one of its atoms may decay. There is
also the equal chance that no atoms will decay. If an atom does
decay it is noticed by the Geiger counter which releases a hammer
that shatters the vial. (8) Is the cat dead or alive? You can not
tell without opening the box and observing the cat. And so it is
with a photon. The possible locations are almost infinite but you can
only speculate using given data from previous observations. The only
way to know is to look - observe - and measure. But once you observe
and/or measure it is not in a wave state. Confused yet? Be honest.
Most of us are even after reading and/or writing it many times.
The
wave goes out in all directions simultaneously just like the ripples
on a pond after the rock your threw hits the water. This means that
when observed and measured the particle may be anywhere. Some of the
behaviors of the particle are amazing but I don't have time to share
them here and those behaviors really aren't important to our
discussion. Using observations and complex formula we can reduce a
totally infinite potential to a given number of of possibilities.
The only reason that I bring this up is that, if you think this
through to the macro-world in which we live, it would seem that if
you close your eyes and open them again your computer might now have
invaded someone's living room blocks away. Theoretically that is
possible. Some people would use this as an argument against the
wave-particle. But it is explainable. You see, there are so many
atoms that the chances for such change are astronomically small. For
example, an apple contains approximately 1.32 x 10+23.
That
is 10 followed by 23 zeros. That's a big bunch of atoms just in an
apple. Can you imagine the statistical probabilities for each of
those atoms to react absolutely the same at any one instance?
Albert
Einstein said "It seems as though we must use sometimes the one
theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We
are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory
pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the
phenomena of life, but together they do." (9)
According
to Trinh Xuan Thuan it is meaningless to talk about an "objective"
reality. (10) "Atoms form a world of potentials and
possibilities, rather than of things and facts," wrote Werner
Heisenberg. (11) In light of the wave-particle it is better that we
not consider a particle a permanent entity. It is more of an
instantaneous event. These events may be linked together to create
the illusion of permanent entities like the individual picture frames
are linked together to make a movie. The movie appears like one
continuous event when it is not.
This
isn't as hard to fathom as one might suspect, unless you are
determined to keep your mind closed and deny what has been proven
time and again. Our awareness that all things are made of atoms goes
back to the sixth century BCE. Two Greek philosophers, Leucippus and
Democritus, were the first to recognize that all matter is made up of
eternal particles which they called "atoms". Atoms are
almost completely empty. The nucleus of the atom accounts for 99.9%
of the atom's mass but only occupies about a thousandth of a
trillionth of its volume. You probably heard that described in your
school science class as being like a single grain of rice in a
football stadium. (12) We are constructed in the same way. The only
reason that we can't walk through walls is that atoms are held
together by electromagnetic force. We are unaware because we cannot
see ourselves or other objects on a micro level and therefore we do
not see the space.
"Up
through the nineteenth century, classical science argued that objects
had an intrinsic existence governed by well-determined laws of cause
and effect. But quantum mechanics, which was developed at the
beginning of the twentieth century, seriously undermined the idea
that the basic ingredients of matter have such a definite existence,
and also raised doubts about whether the world was governed by strict
rules of cause and effect. The Buddhist idea of emptiness seems to be
in harmony with the quantum view of reality. As part of the quest to
understand this true state of reality we call emptiness, Buddhism
seeks to understand the existence, or nonexistence, of so-called
indivisible particles of matter. According to Buddhism, learning to
understand the essential unreality of things, which modern science
has helped to clarify, is an integral part of the spiritual way."
(13)
Emptiness
(sunyata) is totally misunderstood by most westerners, and probably
many Asians if I really knew. Sunyata does not mean complete and
total nothingness as many assume. It does not mean that nothing
exists either. That would be nihilistic and contrary to Buddhist
philosophy. The Heart Sutra says "all phenomena in their
own-being are empty." The key words are "...in their
own-being..." In other words all things, all phenomena, have no
inherent nature in and of themselves. The entire universe and
everything in it is inter-connected, interdependent, interbeing to
use the words of Thich Nhat Hanh. This inter-connectedness means
that the behavior or experience of any one particle or object or
person in the universe will have some effect upon the entire
universe. Consider the wave-state. If this is true, which has been
tested extensively and supported by quantum physics, then we can
wonder whether or not we can bring our minds to bear on reality.
I
would really like to go directly to a nice clean conclusion. There
are those who have, for centuries, taught a simple belief that "if
you can dream it, you can do it." This isn't the same thing as
altering or controlling reality by your mind, or is it? There are
also those who teach that through the power of your mind you can
create your future; e.g. if you want a shiny new Rolls Royce all you
have to do is use the power of your mind. Of course they want some
money to teach you how to do it. I've never heard any success
stories apart from the preachers, therefore I would have to say there
has been nothing similar to scientific replication. In other words, I
have to take a different tact.
I'm
going to explore the position that, yes, our consciousness does
create reality. However, I doubt it is going to be what you expect.
If you think back to the point at which we left definitions and
started to look at quantum physics and Buddhism you will realize that
we were almost 100% concerned about reality. We didn't really
consider consciousness nearly as much.
Our
definition of consciousness hangs upon awareness. But where does
awareness occur in our brain? That raises a serious problem. This
would imply that we need to examine and identify the behavior of
neurons associated with objects of which we are aware. Robert Duncan,
behavioral scientist at York College, believes that consciousness is
a result of metacognition; i.e. planning, reasoning and social
intelligence; and those activities are mainly controlled by the
prefrontal cortex. (14) The problem, which Duncan admits, is that the
prefrontal cortex serves other functions it is "probably
necessary but not sufficient for consciousness to arise." In
other words, we really have no idea.
Personally,
however, I believe that we are dealing with the physiology of our
senses. That parade
of thoughts, feelings, images, ideas, sensations, conceptions,
emotions, and events, of our definition are all tied to how our
brains interpret the data it receives through our sensory organs.
The truth is that our brains receive an electro-chemical charge that
is propagated up the nerve fiber to the brain. (15) Our eyes do not
really see. They collect data - stimuli - which is sent to the brain
for interpretation. All any of our sense organs do is send this
electro-chemical charge to the brain when stimulated. The data means
nothing without the brain to interpret. Without this process there
would be no awareness and no consciousness. The only source of
interpretation is our brains and that interpretation is our reality and we are often confronted by the realization that my reality might not always match your reality. For example, my reality is that a bear is an amazing and beautiful creature but your reality might be that a bear is a terrifying and dangerous monster.
Until we have evidence to the contrary, this means that the only
source of consciousness is somewhere in the brain. And that, dear
reader who has been so kind as to finish reading my feeble analysis,
means that the only source of our reality comes from our
consciousness. Alas,
I am no closer than anyone else to knowing where to find my
consciousness or how it really works. But I do believe that we have
our consciousness to thank for creating our reality.
Russell
E. Vance, III, PhD.
FOOTNOTES:
(1)
Books I've recently read where quantum physics, Buddhism and/or
eastern mysticism collide.
Ricard,
Matthieu and Trinh Xuan Thuan. (2001) The
Quantum and the Lotus.
Three Rivers Press. NYC.
Goswami,
Amit. (1993)
The Self-Aware Universe.
Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam. NYC.
(2)
http://www.markbancroft.com/info/what-is-consciousness
(3)
https://philosophyisnotaluxury.com/2013/03/21/william-james-the-stream-of-consciousness-and-freewill/
(4)
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528840-500-reality-the-definition/
(5)
At the beginning of Star Trek IV, Spock is being tested by a computer
and this was one of the answers.
(6)
Niels Bohr, Ningauble 15:52, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
(7)
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec06.html
(8)
Schrödinger, Erwin (1935) Die gegenwartig Situation in der
Quantenmechanik." Naturwissenschafaten 23(48): 807-812.
(9)
Harrison, David (2002). Complementarity
and the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
UPSCALE. Dept of Physics. Univ. of Toronto. Retrieved 2008-06-21.
(10)
Matthieu and Thuan. p. 82
(11)
Werner Heisenberg (1971) Physics
and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations. Harper
& Row, NYC.
(12)
Matthieu and Thuan. p. 93.
(13)
Matthieu and Thuan. p. 13-14.
(14)
bigthink.com/ideafeed/where-is-consciousness-located-in-the-brain
(15)
Thank you to Anatomy/Physiology teacher Professor Pamela Smith for
making sure I had my process straight.
OTHER
READING:
Stanley
Sobottka. A Course in Consciousness. University of Virginia.
www.faculty.virginia.edu/consciousness. Dr. Sobottka is Emeritus
Professor of Physics. It is about 250+ pages. I have only had a
chance to skim it but all I've read is very interesting. Should be a
good read.
