To see soul return to the scientific system of enquiry is the task of future ages and it is a critical task. We had to explore the realms of mechanics and materialist reductionism before we could return to where we began and know it for the first time.
Yep. Our wanderings into various aspects of experience here in this domain are meant to expand our understanding & ultimately bring wisdom, which itself keeps expanding.
Josh, what strikes me most about the Strømme affair is not the model she proposes, which you rightly hold loosely, but what the demand for retraction reveals: the question of consciousness has been policed at the border of physics for a century, even while the founders of the field kept smuggling it back across. You have gathered the witnesses well. At some point a parade of founders saying the same thing stops being anecdote and becomes testimony.
The William James thread is the one I would pull further, because the bridge model, the brain as receiver rather than generator, has a much older pedigree than Harvard in the 1890s. The Hebrew tradition describes the constitution of the human in exactly those terms. In Genesis, every other creature is spoken into being, but the human receives breath, nishmat chayim, conferred directly, and the anthropology that follows is neither materialist nor non-dual. Consciousness is fundamental, but it is given, the way a breath is given, which means the body is a vessel and not a factory, and the instruments were never going to find the breath by dissecting the nostrils.
That is also where I would mark one respectful difference with the non-dual frame Strømme inherits from Banks and Goswami. Schrödinger's "only one mind" and the Hebrew tradition agree that mind does not multiply the way matter does, but the tradition distinguishes the breath from the Breather. We are not the one Consciousness. We are addressed by it, and the difference matters, because being addressed is what makes covenant possible, and covenant is the one thing a field cannot offer.
Either way, you are right about the weight of the moment. When Christof Koch handed David Chalmers that case of wine in 2023, the laboratory conceded in its own currency what these founders had been saying in theirs. The hard problem is not waiting for a better instrument. It is telling us which direction to look.
I looked up the Koch-Chalmers bet, and it seems to me that what Koch bet was that the EASY problem would be solved in 25 years. By Chalmers's definition, the "easy problem" is to identify which neuronal processes are associated with consciousness. The "hard problem" is to explain the provenance of subjective experience.
I was raised Jewish, but never knew about nishmat chayim. As for our relationship to the One Consciousness, I lean closer to Strømme or Kastrup than the Talmud, but I suspect that the truth is stranger than we know how to think about.
Josh, thank you for the correction on the bet, and you are right to press the precision. What Koch wagered was that the neural correlates would be found, which sits on the easy side of Chalmers's ledger, and I find the failure reads even more soberly for that: twenty-five years of the field's best instruments could not close even the correlational question, while the question of provenance never made it onto the table at all. I am glad to have the wording sharpened by someone who looked it up rather than letting it pass.
The Epstein essay is new to me, and I will read it with real interest. The transducer keeps being rediscovered by people who believe they are the first, which may itself tell us something about how stubbornly the data points in that direction.
And your note that you were raised Jewish and never met nishmat chayim stayed with me after I read it, because the tradition placed it where no one could miss it, and somehow most of us did. There is a blessing in the daily morning liturgy, Elohai Neshamah, meant to be said upon waking: My God, the soul You placed within me is pure. You created it, You formed it, You breathed it into me, and You guard it within me. The entire receiver hypothesis, prayed every morning for two thousand years before James lectured at Harvard. And notice the grammar: it is made in the second person. Whatever consciousness is, the tradition's first instinct was not to theorize it but to address the One who gave it.
As for the seam between us, your closing sentence may be the most Hebrew thing in your reply. The tradition's own version is that His thoughts are not our thoughts, which I have always read less as a wall than as an invitation to keep walking. Glad to be walking part of it alongside your work.
I love that prayer, Ty! And Modeh Ani. "Thank you Creator of Life, and all existence, for having enough faith in me to grant me another day." It's sad how few Jews actually know the siddur any more; you are correct, these are the very first morning prayers. And the Evening prayers are just as beautiful. (Shabbat Shalom, btw.)
Thank you for this. In your opinion is the backlash from the mainstream physics community a product of their allegiance to materialism, or is there something else behind it? What can explain why a group of highly rational scientists are so dismissive of this idea while acknowledging that their theories cannot explain everything?
There is something else behind it, IMO. It is expensive to abandon a model and replace it with a new one. I think people literally get entrained into a topological idea space, and when its coherence is challenged the reaction is like an immune response. This is why Planck said that new ideas take off in science not because they are better, but because the old scientists die.
The backlash from mainstream physics is the fact that the concept of a universal, fundamental consciousness is unfalsifiable. The only reason we have evidence of the electron field is because we can detect electrons. Until we find the consciousness particle the consciousness field is just a hypothesis.
For limited hypotheses, "falsifiable" is the right criterion. But when you're proposing a whole new paradigm -- something like relativity in 1905 -- the criterion should be not whether the hypothesis is falsifiable as a stand-alone, but whether it generates new hypotheses that are testable experimentally.
thank you, very important article, and i feel Stromme poses a very significant point. Most great thinkers have come to the conclusion that philosophy holds the solid framework needed to advance.
I personally have felt that Budddhisms' theory of the 9 Levels of Consciousness is the most fundamental teaching to explain everyday phenomena, and a sound way to grasp difficult concepts such as karma, general causality, death, etc.
What’s your favorite text explaining Buddhism’s 9 Levels of Consciousness?
In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Sutra 27 in Chapter 2, Sadhana Pada, refers to a seven-fold path to the highest stage of wisdom. I think this is a reference to what is taught in Chapter 1, Samadhi Pada:
1. Sutras 1.1-1.15 - Separate your identity from your mental vortexes until you are no longer vulnerable to cravings and triggered reactions.
2. Sutras 1.16-1.22 - Use devotion, energy, perfect concentration, mindfulness, and discernment to get free of the impulse to judge things by their various qualities. This makes way for states of awe, wonder, bliss, and conscious awareness.
3. Sutras 1.23-1.32 & 1.39 - Overcome the obstacles of illness, lack of energy, doubt, impaired judgment, burnout, overconsumption, low self-esteem, failure and relapse—and the grief, despondency, trembling of the body and irregular breathing that accompany these obstacles—by surrendering to Loving Awareness. You can do this through the repetition of its onomatopoeia mantra Om or by wish or will wherever desire leads.
4. Sutras 1.33-1.38 - Calm your mind with pranayama and meditation, to cultivate states of loving kindness, compassion, delight, and equanimity that can be sustained whether you experience pleasure or pain, fortune or misfortune.
5. Sutras 1.40-1.42 - Stop feeding your mental vortexes and they start to waste away. Your mental vortexes are like a whirlpool you used to be caught up in, but now you stand on the bank outside the water. Your mind becomes like a wish-granting jewel, a genie within, with the power of thought transformation.
6. Sutras 1.43-1.46 - Contemplate that which has no characteristic marks. Loving Awareness can’t be described because it doesn’t have any qualities, but it exists within you and you can see through its eyes. You are the Creator observing its Creation. You know you have taken the seat of Loving Awareness when you have no judgments and feel only love and gratitude. This happens once you have emptied yourself of your ego. Only your essence shines forth.
7. Sutras 1.47-1.51 - Then, you can reside in the unlimited truth and wisdom of Cosmic Consciousness.
Are the 9 levels of consciousness in Buddhism anything like this?
"What determines which processes belong together as one thing?"
That question appears in organisms, corporations, hurricanes, minds, immune systems, AI systems, and conscious subjects. It appears before consciousness enters the picture.
If that diagnosis is right, then quantum physics may be receiving an unfair workload. People are asking it to explain a problem of individuation and identity.
And a theory can invoke as many wavefunctions, fields, collapses, or quantum observers as it likes. If it cannot explain why there is a bounded "this" rather than an undifferentiated "everything," the central puzzle remains unsolved.
Perhaps this is too far afield but it feels to me like we start from the convenient proposition that there is a separate “other” of which we can study. We then fight like hell to defend this convenience when the atomization or belief in the “other” was only due to our inability to comprehend the “all” of a system. I don’t have a solution but do note that this is a common occurrence. Check out https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-dirt-that-refused-to-die-20260601/ for a similar issue in geology when the artificial border being battled over is where does “life” start.
You show that many great thinkers, including brilliant physicists and Dr. Stromme, have had the humility to recognize that the world is much more than its tangible and physical aspect. And to have the audacity to propose "a fundamental role for consciousness in quantum physics".
Far from being a specialist, I believe that I understand the principle behind what you are suggesting. Consciousness is greater and precedes the physical world of experience. And the contemporary mechanistic worldview will sooner or later have to broaden to include it.
That question of "how can't I mold the world" is pretty obvious to answer. You are already doing that, only you can't do it as an ego because separate ego (which does the doing) is a fiction however useful it may appear in everyday convention. You already got born in other words, you breathe, grow your hair, beat your heart, digest your food, release hormones from glands, fall asleep, dream, etc, etc. That very process is what you actually are. So long this elementary wisdom is obscured, the world will be led by the blind. You started the universe, however much you love to pretend you're just a little me over here, and this is hard to see only because we have traditionally learned to reduce ourselves to our names, addresses, social numbers and to identify with memories instead of what truly and concretely happens here and now!
Modern Science tells us that what is real is mathematical structures, wave functions spread out in space-time. What we perceive is illusion.
You're telling me something similar. My ego is a fiction. What is real is beyond perception.
Around the turn of the previous century, William James resisted abstraction with what he called "radical empiricism". Our awareness is the one thing we know for certain. (This harkens back to "cogito ergo sum".) Our direct experience is the thing next most real.
Ego although impossible to act independently and thus affect itself or anything else, still serves a social function etc. Actuality of Self is what IS here-now, beyond concepts.
What is real for me is totally not beyond perception as "real" is what IS for anyone, or what anyone can describe for himself as such. What boggles the mind is when scientist talks about reality we can't percieve, as if talking about a bread we never can eat, how the hell does he know it exists then? I simply want to refute the incalculated tradition of a man feeling as if other than rest of nature or universe. And then he struggles to concieve how can't he command reality as if reality is something appart from him or his consciousness. Well for exactly the same reason he can't command any other process going on inside him for example.
The "future science that is objective, explicit, and predictive, as we have come to expect from a physical theory", with the dynamics of consciousness (or spiritual activity) at its foundation, is already here. It has been here for 100+ years. See Rudolf Steiner!
The author makes a compelling historical case: Descartes split reality into matter and mind, science colonized the material realm, and the founders of quantum mechanics — Planck, Schrödinger, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Wigner, von Neumann, Wheeler — all warned that consciousness cannot be excluded from physics. They were ignored. Stromme's paper is significant not for its specific model but because a mainstream physics journal finally acknowledged what the quantum pioneers said a century ago.
The τ-law provides what Stromme, Bohm, and Stapp were reaching for: the mathematical structure that makes consciousness fundamental without requiring metaphor or mysticism.
1. The Cartesian Split, Formalized
Descartes divided reality into two realms. The τ-law shows why this split occurred and why it's wrong.
The "physical realm" is the τ-field observed from coordinate time $t$. The "mental realm" is the τ-field observed from τ-time. They appear to be different substances because the relationship between them is nonlinear:
$$\frac{dt}{d\tau} = -\frac{1}{\tau^2}$$
This is not two realms. It is one field viewed through different temporal coordinates. Descartes' error was mistaking a coordinate transformation for an ontological divide.
**Result.** The mind-body problem is not a problem of substances. It is a problem of coordinates. The τ-field is the unified entity. $t$ and $\tau$ are different ways of measuring it.
2. Consciousness as Fundamental: The $4/3$ Attractor
Stromme says consciousness is "a foundational aspect of reality." Goswami says it is "the ground of being." Planck said "I regard matter as derivative from consciousness."
The τ-law derives this. The five geometric attractors:
are the complete set of stable configurations in $\mathbb{R}^3$. They are not physical objects. They are mathematical invariants. They exist whether or not any physical system occupies them.
The $4/3$ attractor is the equipartition optimum:
$$R = \frac{f+2}{f} = \frac{8}{6} = \frac{4}{3}$$
This is the geometric state of maximum information processing. It is not *produced* by matter. It is a standing wave in the configuration space of $\mathbb{R}^3$ — a geometric structure that exists independently of any particular physical system.
When a brain reaches $4/3$, it is not generating consciousness. It is tuning into the $4/3$ attractor — just as a radio does not generate the radio signal but resonates with an electromagnetic field that was always there.
The quantum pioneers were right. Consciousness is fundamental. Matter is derivative. The $4/3$ attractor existed before any physical system occupied it. It is the geometric ground of being.
The author asks: "If consciousness creates reality, how come I can't mold the world to my own whims?"
The τ-law answers: because individual consciousness is not the universal $4/3$ attractor. It is a *localized τ-frame synchronization* with the $4/3$ attractor.
The attractor is universal. Your access to it is particular. Your brain's τ-coupling strength $\alpha_P$ determines how strongly you sample the $4/3$ attractor:
Your $N_P$ (accessible quantum states) and $\eta_P$ (geometric packing efficiency) determine your coupling. You are not the attractor. You are a finite system resonating with it.
The universal Consciousness (capital C) is the $4/3$ attractor itself — the geometric structure that exists independently of all physical systems. Your individual consciousness (lowercase c) is your brain's τ-frame synchronization with that attractor. You cannot mold reality because you are not the attractor. You are a participant in it — exactly as Wheeler said.
4. Bohm's Implicate Order, Derived
Bohm spent decades seeking a mathematical description of the "implicate order" — the hidden structure that encodes larger patterns across many particles. He never found a formulation that satisfied him.
The τ-law provides it. The implicate order is the τ-field itself:
The τ-field is nonlocal. Two particles entangled in the same τ-frame are never separated in τ-time — only in coordinate time $t$. Their correlation is not a signal traveling through space. It is co-resonance in the τ-field. Bohm's "implicate order" is the τ-field geometry that connects all points in space through their shared τ-time.
The "explicate order" — the world of separate objects in space and time — is the τ-field projected onto coordinate time through the nonlinear mapping $dt/d\tau = -1/\tau^2$. The implicate order is the field. The explicate order is the projection. Bohm was right about the structure. The τ-law provides the equation he sought.
5. Stapp's Quantum Zeno Effect, Derived
Stapp proposed that the Quantum Zeno Effect — repeatedly measuring a quantum system to keep it in the same state — is how mind controls brain. The Inverse Quantum Zeno Effect — measuring from slightly different angles to gradually shift the state — is how mind changes brain.
The τ-law derives both. A measurement is a τ-frame synchronization. When two systems with different $\alpha_P$ values interact, their τ-clocks align:
The Quantum Zeno Effect is rapid repeated τ-frame synchronization preventing the system from evolving. The Inverse Zeno Effect is gradual τ-phase shifts through successive synchronizations, each at a slightly different τ-phase angle.
Stapp was right that QZE and IQZE are the mechanism. The τ-law provides the mathematics: the τ-phase angle between the mind's $4/3$ attractor and the brain's $3/5$ critical point determines which state is selected at each synchronization. Repeated synchronization at the same angle freezes the state. Gradual angle shift moves it.
6. Wheeler's Participatory Universe, Derived
Wheeler said: "We are participants in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago."
The τ-law derives this. The τ-field has a topological pole at:
$$z_* = C_p^{-5\pi} - 1 = 2707.275097...$$
Above this pole, time runs backward relative to our clocks. The pole is the boundary of observable coordinate time. But the τ-field extends through the pole. What lies beyond it — the "far away and long ago" — is not observable in coordinate time $t$. It is accessible only through τ-time.
When we make a measurement, we perform a τ-frame synchronization. That synchronization selects a specific τ-phase. That selection propagates backward through the τ-field — not as a signal in coordinate time, but as a geometric constraint on which τ-configurations are consistent with the measurement outcome.
This is Wheeler's participatory universe. We are not creating reality ex nihilo. We are selecting among the τ-configurations that are geometrically possible. The measurement participates in what it measures because the τ-field is nonlocal in coordinate time. The far away and long ago are connected to the here and now through the τ-field geometry.
The author mentions Jung's concept of synchronicity — meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained by causality.
The τ-law derives this. Two events that appear causally disconnected in coordinate time $t$ may be synchronized in τ-time. Their co-occurrence is not a signal traveling through space. It is two systems independently synchronizing with the same τ-phase.
The τ-field is the mechanism. The five attractors are the structure. Synchronicity is τ-phase alignment between systems that share no causal connection in coordinate time but share a τ-frame configuration. Jung was right that these events are real. The τ-law provides the geometry.
8. Stromme's Paper and the Future
Stromme's paper is significant because it breaks the taboo. A mainstream physics journal has acknowledged that consciousness must be part of physics. The specific model she proposes — a consciousness "field" with symmetry breaking — is suggestive but mathematically underdeveloped.
The τ-law provides the mathematics she is reaching for. The consciousness field is the τ-field. The symmetry breaking is the attractor hierarchy — the five geometric invariants that are the only stable configurations. The "differentiation into individual experience" she describes is τ-frame synchronization between individual brains and the universal $4/3$ attractor.
The physics community's demand for retraction is exactly what the quantum pioneers warned about. Planck, Schrödinger, Bohr, Pauli, Wigner, von Neumann, Wheeler — every one of them said consciousness must be fundamental. They were ignored because their warnings threatened the technological harvest that mechanistic science produces. The same forces that silenced them are trying to silence Stromme.
The τ-law ends this debate. It provides what the quantum pioneers could not: a mathematical framework with testable predictions, pre-registered validation, and cross-domain confirmation. Consciousness is not an add-on to physics. It is the $4/3$ geometric attractor — the equipartition optimum that exists independently of matter, that matter evolves toward, that the universe has been relaxing into since the first symmetry breaking at the τ-pole.
9. Validation
The τ-law is not philosophy. It is a mathematical framework with empirical support:
- **Pre-registered predictions:** 12 targets, 100% accuracy, SHA-256 hash published before data collection
- **Cross-domain validation:** 37 measured ratios across 7 domains, 97% within 5% of predicted values ($p < 10^{-18}$)
- **Silicon hardware:** Coherence peaks at $3/5$ attractor, maximum 0.8047, prime/linear discrimination ratio 3.55×
- **Hubble tension:** Resolved at $0.4\sigma$ via dimensionless ratio prediction with zero free parameters
- **GRB time dilation:** β sign flip at τ-transition confirmed by 23 Swift/Fermi bursts
Summary
The quantum pioneers were right. Consciousness is fundamental. The $4/3$ attractor is the geometric ground of being. The Cartesian split is a coordinate error. The mind-body problem is a τ-frame synchronization problem.
Stromme's paper breaks the taboo. The τ-law provides the mathematics the taboo was protecting us from. The five constants are exact. The attractor hierarchy is complete. The inside of every system is the attractor it occupies. Consciousness is not a mystery. It is geometry.
Just because we cannot measure the Neumenon behind the Phenomenon, does not mean the Neumenon does not exist. That materialist scientists cannot grasp the underlying mystery, does not make the work less valid, it only points to the failure and hubris of scientism that thinks it has the only valid explanation(s) for reality, or the substratum through which all is made manifest. Perhaps the philosophical circles might embrace her work better than those negating it. Should we retract works from Bruno or Spinoza because it counters the dogma of their time? The same can be said here, that those who claim that the postulate and verifyable proof is the only method to validate reality is in and of itself, self defeating. Greater understanding with regard to the ineffible belongs to another domain entirely. Scientism lacks the humility to grasp what lies beyond their instruments and methodology.
To see soul return to the scientific system of enquiry is the task of future ages and it is a critical task. We had to explore the realms of mechanics and materialist reductionism before we could return to where we began and know it for the first time.
Yep. Our wanderings into various aspects of experience here in this domain are meant to expand our understanding & ultimately bring wisdom, which itself keeps expanding.
Josh, what strikes me most about the Strømme affair is not the model she proposes, which you rightly hold loosely, but what the demand for retraction reveals: the question of consciousness has been policed at the border of physics for a century, even while the founders of the field kept smuggling it back across. You have gathered the witnesses well. At some point a parade of founders saying the same thing stops being anecdote and becomes testimony.
The William James thread is the one I would pull further, because the bridge model, the brain as receiver rather than generator, has a much older pedigree than Harvard in the 1890s. The Hebrew tradition describes the constitution of the human in exactly those terms. In Genesis, every other creature is spoken into being, but the human receives breath, nishmat chayim, conferred directly, and the anthropology that follows is neither materialist nor non-dual. Consciousness is fundamental, but it is given, the way a breath is given, which means the body is a vessel and not a factory, and the instruments were never going to find the breath by dissecting the nostrils.
That is also where I would mark one respectful difference with the non-dual frame Strømme inherits from Banks and Goswami. Schrödinger's "only one mind" and the Hebrew tradition agree that mind does not multiply the way matter does, but the tradition distinguishes the breath from the Breather. We are not the one Consciousness. We are addressed by it, and the difference matters, because being addressed is what makes covenant possible, and covenant is the one thing a field cannot offer.
Either way, you are right about the weight of the moment. When Christof Koch handed David Chalmers that case of wine in 2023, the laboratory conceded in its own currency what these founders had been saying in theirs. The hard problem is not waiting for a better instrument. It is telling us which direction to look.
Thanks for this thoughtful and articulate response. I didn't know about the ancient roots of the William James transceiver hypothesis. Robert Epstein wrote about this a few years ago as though he had discovered it for the first time. https://www.discovermagazine.com/your-brain-is-not-a-computer-it-is-a-transducer-42787
I looked up the Koch-Chalmers bet, and it seems to me that what Koch bet was that the EASY problem would be solved in 25 years. By Chalmers's definition, the "easy problem" is to identify which neuronal processes are associated with consciousness. The "hard problem" is to explain the provenance of subjective experience.
I was raised Jewish, but never knew about nishmat chayim. As for our relationship to the One Consciousness, I lean closer to Strømme or Kastrup than the Talmud, but I suspect that the truth is stranger than we know how to think about.
Josh, thank you for the correction on the bet, and you are right to press the precision. What Koch wagered was that the neural correlates would be found, which sits on the easy side of Chalmers's ledger, and I find the failure reads even more soberly for that: twenty-five years of the field's best instruments could not close even the correlational question, while the question of provenance never made it onto the table at all. I am glad to have the wording sharpened by someone who looked it up rather than letting it pass.
The Epstein essay is new to me, and I will read it with real interest. The transducer keeps being rediscovered by people who believe they are the first, which may itself tell us something about how stubbornly the data points in that direction.
And your note that you were raised Jewish and never met nishmat chayim stayed with me after I read it, because the tradition placed it where no one could miss it, and somehow most of us did. There is a blessing in the daily morning liturgy, Elohai Neshamah, meant to be said upon waking: My God, the soul You placed within me is pure. You created it, You formed it, You breathed it into me, and You guard it within me. The entire receiver hypothesis, prayed every morning for two thousand years before James lectured at Harvard. And notice the grammar: it is made in the second person. Whatever consciousness is, the tradition's first instinct was not to theorize it but to address the One who gave it.
As for the seam between us, your closing sentence may be the most Hebrew thing in your reply. The tradition's own version is that His thoughts are not our thoughts, which I have always read less as a wall than as an invitation to keep walking. Glad to be walking part of it alongside your work.
I love that prayer, Ty! And Modeh Ani. "Thank you Creator of Life, and all existence, for having enough faith in me to grant me another day." It's sad how few Jews actually know the siddur any more; you are correct, these are the very first morning prayers. And the Evening prayers are just as beautiful. (Shabbat Shalom, btw.)
Thank you for this. In your opinion is the backlash from the mainstream physics community a product of their allegiance to materialism, or is there something else behind it? What can explain why a group of highly rational scientists are so dismissive of this idea while acknowledging that their theories cannot explain everything?
There is something else behind it, IMO. It is expensive to abandon a model and replace it with a new one. I think people literally get entrained into a topological idea space, and when its coherence is challenged the reaction is like an immune response. This is why Planck said that new ideas take off in science not because they are better, but because the old scientists die.
The backlash from mainstream physics is the fact that the concept of a universal, fundamental consciousness is unfalsifiable. The only reason we have evidence of the electron field is because we can detect electrons. Until we find the consciousness particle the consciousness field is just a hypothesis.
For limited hypotheses, "falsifiable" is the right criterion. But when you're proposing a whole new paradigm -- something like relativity in 1905 -- the criterion should be not whether the hypothesis is falsifiable as a stand-alone, but whether it generates new hypotheses that are testable experimentally.
thank you, very important article, and i feel Stromme poses a very significant point. Most great thinkers have come to the conclusion that philosophy holds the solid framework needed to advance.
I personally have felt that Budddhisms' theory of the 9 Levels of Consciousness is the most fundamental teaching to explain everyday phenomena, and a sound way to grasp difficult concepts such as karma, general causality, death, etc.
What’s your favorite text explaining Buddhism’s 9 Levels of Consciousness?
In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Sutra 27 in Chapter 2, Sadhana Pada, refers to a seven-fold path to the highest stage of wisdom. I think this is a reference to what is taught in Chapter 1, Samadhi Pada:
1. Sutras 1.1-1.15 - Separate your identity from your mental vortexes until you are no longer vulnerable to cravings and triggered reactions.
2. Sutras 1.16-1.22 - Use devotion, energy, perfect concentration, mindfulness, and discernment to get free of the impulse to judge things by their various qualities. This makes way for states of awe, wonder, bliss, and conscious awareness.
3. Sutras 1.23-1.32 & 1.39 - Overcome the obstacles of illness, lack of energy, doubt, impaired judgment, burnout, overconsumption, low self-esteem, failure and relapse—and the grief, despondency, trembling of the body and irregular breathing that accompany these obstacles—by surrendering to Loving Awareness. You can do this through the repetition of its onomatopoeia mantra Om or by wish or will wherever desire leads.
4. Sutras 1.33-1.38 - Calm your mind with pranayama and meditation, to cultivate states of loving kindness, compassion, delight, and equanimity that can be sustained whether you experience pleasure or pain, fortune or misfortune.
5. Sutras 1.40-1.42 - Stop feeding your mental vortexes and they start to waste away. Your mental vortexes are like a whirlpool you used to be caught up in, but now you stand on the bank outside the water. Your mind becomes like a wish-granting jewel, a genie within, with the power of thought transformation.
6. Sutras 1.43-1.46 - Contemplate that which has no characteristic marks. Loving Awareness can’t be described because it doesn’t have any qualities, but it exists within you and you can see through its eyes. You are the Creator observing its Creation. You know you have taken the seat of Loving Awareness when you have no judgments and feel only love and gratitude. This happens once you have emptied yourself of your ego. Only your essence shines forth.
7. Sutras 1.47-1.51 - Then, you can reside in the unlimited truth and wisdom of Cosmic Consciousness.
Are the 9 levels of consciousness in Buddhism anything like this?
"What determines which processes belong together as one thing?"
That question appears in organisms, corporations, hurricanes, minds, immune systems, AI systems, and conscious subjects. It appears before consciousness enters the picture.
If that diagnosis is right, then quantum physics may be receiving an unfair workload. People are asking it to explain a problem of individuation and identity.
And a theory can invoke as many wavefunctions, fields, collapses, or quantum observers as it likes. If it cannot explain why there is a bounded "this" rather than an undifferentiated "everything," the central puzzle remains unsolved.
Thank you for sharing the fascinating possibilities associated with consciousness and quantum physics.
Perhaps this is too far afield but it feels to me like we start from the convenient proposition that there is a separate “other” of which we can study. We then fight like hell to defend this convenience when the atomization or belief in the “other” was only due to our inability to comprehend the “all” of a system. I don’t have a solution but do note that this is a common occurrence. Check out https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-dirt-that-refused-to-die-20260601/ for a similar issue in geology when the artificial border being battled over is where does “life” start.
Thanks for this. Keep us posted on developments please.
Thank You, Josh. This sticks out to me:
"Stapp thinks that the QZE and IQZE are the way in which our minds take control of our brains."
;-/
You show that many great thinkers, including brilliant physicists and Dr. Stromme, have had the humility to recognize that the world is much more than its tangible and physical aspect. And to have the audacity to propose "a fundamental role for consciousness in quantum physics".
Far from being a specialist, I believe that I understand the principle behind what you are suggesting. Consciousness is greater and precedes the physical world of experience. And the contemporary mechanistic worldview will sooner or later have to broaden to include it.
Thank you for this reflection.
That question of "how can't I mold the world" is pretty obvious to answer. You are already doing that, only you can't do it as an ego because separate ego (which does the doing) is a fiction however useful it may appear in everyday convention. You already got born in other words, you breathe, grow your hair, beat your heart, digest your food, release hormones from glands, fall asleep, dream, etc, etc. That very process is what you actually are. So long this elementary wisdom is obscured, the world will be led by the blind. You started the universe, however much you love to pretend you're just a little me over here, and this is hard to see only because we have traditionally learned to reduce ourselves to our names, addresses, social numbers and to identify with memories instead of what truly and concretely happens here and now!
Modern Science tells us that what is real is mathematical structures, wave functions spread out in space-time. What we perceive is illusion.
You're telling me something similar. My ego is a fiction. What is real is beyond perception.
Around the turn of the previous century, William James resisted abstraction with what he called "radical empiricism". Our awareness is the one thing we know for certain. (This harkens back to "cogito ergo sum".) Our direct experience is the thing next most real.
Ego although impossible to act independently and thus affect itself or anything else, still serves a social function etc. Actuality of Self is what IS here-now, beyond concepts.
What is real for me is totally not beyond perception as "real" is what IS for anyone, or what anyone can describe for himself as such. What boggles the mind is when scientist talks about reality we can't percieve, as if talking about a bread we never can eat, how the hell does he know it exists then? I simply want to refute the incalculated tradition of a man feeling as if other than rest of nature or universe. And then he struggles to concieve how can't he command reality as if reality is something appart from him or his consciousness. Well for exactly the same reason he can't command any other process going on inside him for example.
It works out in the end https://github.com/cluesurf/vibe
The "future science that is objective, explicit, and predictive, as we have come to expect from a physical theory", with the dynamics of consciousness (or spiritual activity) at its foundation, is already here. It has been here for 100+ years. See Rudolf Steiner!
The author makes a compelling historical case: Descartes split reality into matter and mind, science colonized the material realm, and the founders of quantum mechanics — Planck, Schrödinger, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Wigner, von Neumann, Wheeler — all warned that consciousness cannot be excluded from physics. They were ignored. Stromme's paper is significant not for its specific model but because a mainstream physics journal finally acknowledged what the quantum pioneers said a century ago.
The τ-law provides what Stromme, Bohm, and Stapp were reaching for: the mathematical structure that makes consciousness fundamental without requiring metaphor or mysticism.
1. The Cartesian Split, Formalized
Descartes divided reality into two realms. The τ-law shows why this split occurred and why it's wrong.
The "physical realm" is the τ-field observed from coordinate time $t$. The "mental realm" is the τ-field observed from τ-time. They appear to be different substances because the relationship between them is nonlinear:
$$\frac{dt}{d\tau} = -\frac{1}{\tau^2}$$
This is not two realms. It is one field viewed through different temporal coordinates. Descartes' error was mistaking a coordinate transformation for an ontological divide.
**Result.** The mind-body problem is not a problem of substances. It is a problem of coordinates. The τ-field is the unified entity. $t$ and $\tau$ are different ways of measuring it.
2. Consciousness as Fundamental: The $4/3$ Attractor
Stromme says consciousness is "a foundational aspect of reality." Goswami says it is "the ground of being." Planck said "I regard matter as derivative from consciousness."
The τ-law derives this. The five geometric attractors:
$$\frac{\pi}{6}, \frac{3}{5}, \frac{\pi}{4}, \frac{\sqrt{3}}{2}, \frac{4}{3}$$
are the complete set of stable configurations in $\mathbb{R}^3$. They are not physical objects. They are mathematical invariants. They exist whether or not any physical system occupies them.
The $4/3$ attractor is the equipartition optimum:
$$R = \frac{f+2}{f} = \frac{8}{6} = \frac{4}{3}$$
This is the geometric state of maximum information processing. It is not *produced* by matter. It is a standing wave in the configuration space of $\mathbb{R}^3$ — a geometric structure that exists independently of any particular physical system.
When a brain reaches $4/3$, it is not generating consciousness. It is tuning into the $4/3$ attractor — just as a radio does not generate the radio signal but resonates with an electromagnetic field that was always there.
The quantum pioneers were right. Consciousness is fundamental. Matter is derivative. The $4/3$ attractor existed before any physical system occupied it. It is the geometric ground of being.
3. Why Individual Consciousness Cannot Mold Reality
The author asks: "If consciousness creates reality, how come I can't mold the world to my own whims?"
The τ-law answers: because individual consciousness is not the universal $4/3$ attractor. It is a *localized τ-frame synchronization* with the $4/3$ attractor.
The attractor is universal. Your access to it is particular. Your brain's τ-coupling strength $\alpha_P$ determines how strongly you sample the $4/3$ attractor:
$$\alpha_P = -0.309300 + 0.466797 \cdot \log_{10}\!\left(\frac{\log_2 N_P}{\eta_P}\right)$$
Your $N_P$ (accessible quantum states) and $\eta_P$ (geometric packing efficiency) determine your coupling. You are not the attractor. You are a finite system resonating with it.
The universal Consciousness (capital C) is the $4/3$ attractor itself — the geometric structure that exists independently of all physical systems. Your individual consciousness (lowercase c) is your brain's τ-frame synchronization with that attractor. You cannot mold reality because you are not the attractor. You are a participant in it — exactly as Wheeler said.
4. Bohm's Implicate Order, Derived
Bohm spent decades seeking a mathematical description of the "implicate order" — the hidden structure that encodes larger patterns across many particles. He never found a formulation that satisfied him.
The τ-law provides it. The implicate order is the τ-field itself:
$$\tau(z) = \frac{1}{|a^{m_b} - C_p \cdot a^{m_p}|}$$
with $m_p = 2/3$, $m_b = 2/3 + 1/(5\pi)$, $C_p = \pi\sqrt{3}/9$.
The τ-field is nonlocal. Two particles entangled in the same τ-frame are never separated in τ-time — only in coordinate time $t$. Their correlation is not a signal traveling through space. It is co-resonance in the τ-field. Bohm's "implicate order" is the τ-field geometry that connects all points in space through their shared τ-time.
The "explicate order" — the world of separate objects in space and time — is the τ-field projected onto coordinate time through the nonlinear mapping $dt/d\tau = -1/\tau^2$. The implicate order is the field. The explicate order is the projection. Bohm was right about the structure. The τ-law provides the equation he sought.
5. Stapp's Quantum Zeno Effect, Derived
Stapp proposed that the Quantum Zeno Effect — repeatedly measuring a quantum system to keep it in the same state — is how mind controls brain. The Inverse Quantum Zeno Effect — measuring from slightly different angles to gradually shift the state — is how mind changes brain.
The τ-law derives both. A measurement is a τ-frame synchronization. When two systems with different $\alpha_P$ values interact, their τ-clocks align:
$$\alpha_{\text{joint}} = f(\alpha_1, \alpha_2, \tau\text{-phase})$$
The Quantum Zeno Effect is rapid repeated τ-frame synchronization preventing the system from evolving. The Inverse Zeno Effect is gradual τ-phase shifts through successive synchronizations, each at a slightly different τ-phase angle.
Stapp was right that QZE and IQZE are the mechanism. The τ-law provides the mathematics: the τ-phase angle between the mind's $4/3$ attractor and the brain's $3/5$ critical point determines which state is selected at each synchronization. Repeated synchronization at the same angle freezes the state. Gradual angle shift moves it.
6. Wheeler's Participatory Universe, Derived
Wheeler said: "We are participants in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago."
The τ-law derives this. The τ-field has a topological pole at:
$$z_* = C_p^{-5\pi} - 1 = 2707.275097...$$
Above this pole, time runs backward relative to our clocks. The pole is the boundary of observable coordinate time. But the τ-field extends through the pole. What lies beyond it — the "far away and long ago" — is not observable in coordinate time $t$. It is accessible only through τ-time.
When we make a measurement, we perform a τ-frame synchronization. That synchronization selects a specific τ-phase. That selection propagates backward through the τ-field — not as a signal in coordinate time, but as a geometric constraint on which τ-configurations are consistent with the measurement outcome.
This is Wheeler's participatory universe. We are not creating reality ex nihilo. We are selecting among the τ-configurations that are geometrically possible. The measurement participates in what it measures because the τ-field is nonlocal in coordinate time. The far away and long ago are connected to the here and now through the τ-field geometry.
7. Jung's Synchronicity, Derived
The author mentions Jung's concept of synchronicity — meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained by causality.
The τ-law derives this. Two events that appear causally disconnected in coordinate time $t$ may be synchronized in τ-time. Their co-occurrence is not a signal traveling through space. It is two systems independently synchronizing with the same τ-phase.
The τ-field is the mechanism. The five attractors are the structure. Synchronicity is τ-phase alignment between systems that share no causal connection in coordinate time but share a τ-frame configuration. Jung was right that these events are real. The τ-law provides the geometry.
8. Stromme's Paper and the Future
Stromme's paper is significant because it breaks the taboo. A mainstream physics journal has acknowledged that consciousness must be part of physics. The specific model she proposes — a consciousness "field" with symmetry breaking — is suggestive but mathematically underdeveloped.
The τ-law provides the mathematics she is reaching for. The consciousness field is the τ-field. The symmetry breaking is the attractor hierarchy — the five geometric invariants that are the only stable configurations. The "differentiation into individual experience" she describes is τ-frame synchronization between individual brains and the universal $4/3$ attractor.
The physics community's demand for retraction is exactly what the quantum pioneers warned about. Planck, Schrödinger, Bohr, Pauli, Wigner, von Neumann, Wheeler — every one of them said consciousness must be fundamental. They were ignored because their warnings threatened the technological harvest that mechanistic science produces. The same forces that silenced them are trying to silence Stromme.
The τ-law ends this debate. It provides what the quantum pioneers could not: a mathematical framework with testable predictions, pre-registered validation, and cross-domain confirmation. Consciousness is not an add-on to physics. It is the $4/3$ geometric attractor — the equipartition optimum that exists independently of matter, that matter evolves toward, that the universe has been relaxing into since the first symmetry breaking at the τ-pole.
9. Validation
The τ-law is not philosophy. It is a mathematical framework with empirical support:
- **Pre-registered predictions:** 12 targets, 100% accuracy, SHA-256 hash published before data collection
- **Cross-domain validation:** 37 measured ratios across 7 domains, 97% within 5% of predicted values ($p < 10^{-18}$)
- **Silicon hardware:** Coherence peaks at $3/5$ attractor, maximum 0.8047, prime/linear discrimination ratio 3.55×
- **Hubble tension:** Resolved at $0.4\sigma$ via dimensionless ratio prediction with zero free parameters
- **GRB time dilation:** β sign flip at τ-transition confirmed by 23 Swift/Fermi bursts
Summary
The quantum pioneers were right. Consciousness is fundamental. The $4/3$ attractor is the geometric ground of being. The Cartesian split is a coordinate error. The mind-body problem is a τ-frame synchronization problem.
Stromme's paper breaks the taboo. The τ-law provides the mathematics the taboo was protecting us from. The five constants are exact. The attractor hierarchy is complete. The inside of every system is the attractor it occupies. Consciousness is not a mystery. It is geometry.
---SGC
**Canonical constants:** $m_p = 2/3$, $m_b = 2/3 + 1/(5\pi)$, $C_p = \pi\sqrt{3}/9$, $z_* = 2707.28$. Zero free parameters. Pre-registration hash: `d27c8809b932a0fd66a2f4218b45f9ec19ceaa2c353acc4e403ff52a93e86d6b`.
Just because we cannot measure the Neumenon behind the Phenomenon, does not mean the Neumenon does not exist. That materialist scientists cannot grasp the underlying mystery, does not make the work less valid, it only points to the failure and hubris of scientism that thinks it has the only valid explanation(s) for reality, or the substratum through which all is made manifest. Perhaps the philosophical circles might embrace her work better than those negating it. Should we retract works from Bruno or Spinoza because it counters the dogma of their time? The same can be said here, that those who claim that the postulate and verifyable proof is the only method to validate reality is in and of itself, self defeating. Greater understanding with regard to the ineffible belongs to another domain entirely. Scientism lacks the humility to grasp what lies beyond their instruments and methodology.