A Consciousness Field at the Foundation of Reality

review of a physics paper by Maria Stromme

For the first time, a paper has been published in a mainstream physics journal proposing a fundamental role for consciousness in quantum physics. This is long overdue. There are mainstream physicists who are not just refuting it, but demanding that the journal retract the article. The article is interesting in its own right, but more significant is the breakthrough into the mainstream that it represents.

History

Through millennia of history and pre-history, humans have always thought of the universe as alive. During the Renaissance, science in Europe began to challenge the religious establishment with mechanistic accounts of the movement of the planets, including Earth. The Church first responded with the expedient of burning scientists at the stake, most prominently Giordano Bruno in 1600. As that stratagem became less sustainable, the Church commissioned René Descartes, a trusted Jesuit, to propose a less drastic means by which the Church could maintain its authority. Descartes proposed dividing all reality into the tangible realm of the physical, and the intangible realm of thought, spirit, and divinity. Science was to have authority in the former, and the Church in the latter.

I would judge that René forged a good compromise. It might have been a viable framework for science and philosophy during the ensuing enlightenment. The Church kept to its half of the bargain, but it was the scientists who undermined it. Almost immediately, scientists began to scoff at the latter of Descartes’s two realms. As science grew to explain more and more from physical reasoning, prominent scientists hypothesized that there is no need for the world of thought, Plato’s forms, the spiritual realm of the Church, for God and his minions — matter and energy, forces in space and time could explain all.

A turning point came in 1828 with the synthesis of urea [sic]. Before that time, living things were recognized as being obviously able to do things that non-living matter could not. Urea was the first organic chemical to be manufactured in a test tube.

See?! Science can do anything that life can do. An audacious extrapolation, to say the least. At the time, it was known that life was made of cells, but cells were thought to be unstructured bags of chemicals. Only in the 20th century did we learn that each cell has thousands of organelles, an endoplasmic reticulum serving as a network to route each chemical to its targeted destination, power plants in the form of mitochondria, chemical factories in the form of ribosomes, and a HQ in the nucleus directing the whole show. A living eukaryotic cell is as complex in its organization and workflow as a medium-sized modern city.

But scientists had broken the dam by creating an organic molecule from inorganic starting materials. It remained only to fill in the details.

Backlash

The intellectual land grab by science became irresistible because of the explosion of new technologies that grew from its fertile soil. There were transatlantic communications cables (1858), mechanized textile factories (1771), railroads with steam engines (1825), chemical fertilizers to replace guano (1903). Meanwhile, prominent intellectuals of the day were protesting, among them R.W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, George Eliot. Here are my favorite lines from James Russell Lowell:

We see but half the causes of our deeds,
Seeking them wholly in the outer life,
And heedless of the encircling spirit-world,
Which, though unseen, is felt, and sows in us
All germs of pure and world-wide purposes.

From one stage of our being to the next
We pass unconscious o’er a slender bridge,
The momentary work of unseen hands,
Which crumbles down behind us; looking back,
We see the other shore, the gulf between,
And, marvelling how we won to where we stand,
Content ourselves to call the builder Chance.

Nietzsche was prescient in foreseeing the collapse of society that would result when science deposed God and substituted Technocracy.

“God remains dead and we have killed him…What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

It was not only the poets and philosophers who realized that the intellectual foundations of Western thought had taken a wrong turn. The smartest architects of the quantum revolution all warned us that science itself was pointing to the need for a realm of consciousness apart from the realm of matter.

Max Planck said that “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.”

Schrödinger wrote that “Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; what seems to be the many conscious beings is only a feature of the one…In truth there is only one mind.”

Eddington wrote that “The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.”

James Jeans: “The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”

John Wheeler wrote: ‘We are participants in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago.”

Eugene Wigner: “It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”

John von Neumann wrote a textbook on quantum mechanics, based on the premise that conscious observers were needed to make any sense of the new rules of physics.

But the technological harvest continued to spread its seductive opulence, and the 19th century mechanistic world-view was entrenched in more than the science world. We have yet to recover from the 19th century conceit that science can explain all in purely mechanistic terms.

picture credit: Phys.org

The Article

The most significant thing about this paper is not the specific model that it proposes, but the fact that a mainstream physics journal has finally acknowledged the elephant in the room.

Maria Stromme is a professor of applied physics at Uppsala University in Sweden. Her article was published by the American Institute of Physics in AIP Advances last October, and is fighting retraction. The title is, Universal consciousness as foundational field: A theoretical bridge between quantum physics and non-dual philosophy. This is not a new theory — her ideas are general and suggestive — but the article lays out some principles that forward-looking physicists have agreed might be the basis of a future rewriting of the foundations of physics.

Amit Goswami is fond of saying, “Consciousness is the ground of being.”

Stromme echoes, “consciousness is not an emergent property of neural processes but a foundational aspect of reality.”

William James said as much 130 years ago in his Harvard Ingersoll lecture. The brain doesn’t produce consciousness. Consciousness was there all along, more fundamental than matter, pre-existing space and perhaps time. The function of the brain is to bridge between the Platonic realm in which consciousness dwells and the realm of physical, material things.

“Differentiation into individual experience occurs via mechanisms such as symmetry breaking, quantum fluctuations, and discrete state selection—paralleling established concepts in physics, including Bohm’s implicate order, Heisenberg’s potentia, and Wheeler’s participatory universe.” [Stromme]

This is Stromme’s particular take on the obvious and challenging question that arises from this inverted world-view, with consciousness at the foundation: I am a conscious being. If consciousness creates reality, how come I can’t mold the world to my own whims? This is not the world I choose, or anything I would have chosen.

This is the question of the relationship between my individual consciousness and the capital “C” Consciousness that is Goswami’s “ground of being”. Various philosophers have proposed various answers. Stromme’s answer sounds like physics. She invokes a consciousness “field” because fields are ubiquitous in modern physics. She talks about “symmetry breaking” because this is the language that particle physicists use in speaking about why the weak nuclear force appears to be such a different thing from the electric force between particles, even though they derive from the same fundamental phenomena. Perhaps the physics language is the reason she was able to get the paper published, and perhaps the physicists are right to cry “foul” and accuse her of using these words glibly, without showing us the mathematical details.

Much of the framework concerning consciousness is taken (with attribution) from the late Sydney Banks and his “three principles of thought”. Consciousness is pure awareness, on which is imposed content in the form of thoughts. Mind itself is the third principle. To Banks (and to Stromme), mind is the universal substrate from which all existence arises.

Stromme takes the philosophy of Banks and draws analogies from quantum physics, hinting at a future science that is objective, explicit, and predictive, as we have come to expect from a physical theory. Critics of this paper doubt that such a theory will ever be formulated, and I have to agree.

Two recognized and accomplished physicists who have preceded Stromme into the realm of philosophy are David Bohm and Henry Stapp.

Stromme cites Bohm extensively. If there is a physical basis for what we experience as destiny, or Dao, or the Universe nudging us toward a predefined path — what Jung called “synchronicity” — then we look to Bohm to describe the way that larger patterns can be coded into patterns in the microstate, spread out over many particles. He called it the Implicate Order. Bohm spent the last decades of his life trying to pin down these ideas as a predictive physical theory, but was never satisfied with his results.

Stapp is of the generation after Bohm, still alive today, and he wrote three books explicitly about philosophical interpretations of quantum physics, and though he is cited only peripherally by Stromme, I feel his work is the best foundation we have going forward with this subject. If John Wheeler gave us the idea that reality is co-created by wave functions and the minds that choose how to pin them to observations, then Stapp is the one who has developed this idea as the basis of a scientific ontology. Starting with Bell’s Theorem in 1964, it was clear to physicists that the observer’s choice of what to measure must change outcomes, but in Bell’s example, the change was in a random direction. In the 1980s, Stapp invoked the Quantum Zeno Effect as the mechanism by which choosing what to measure can change reality in directed ways. The Zeno Effect keeps the system in the same state by repeatedly measuring the same thing. The Inverse Zeno Effect moves a system gradually from one state to another by making successive measurements, each viewing the system from a slightly different angle. I explained how this works in some detail in this space four years ago. Stapp thinks that the QZE and IQZE are the way in which our minds take control of our brains. He finds precedent for this idea in the writings of William James going back to 1892.

Stromme concludes by describing her ideas as a “framework” for expanding our scientific understanding of reality. “By synthesizing insights from physics, metaphysics, and philosophy, this model offers a path toward an integrated understanding that unites scientific rigor with ancient philosophical insight.” I agree this is the deepest intellectual (and spiritual) challenge facing our Western culture at this seminal time in history.