Does consciousness create reality?

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.