Category Archives: Conscious Universe

The Meaning of Life: A Theory of Everything including Consciousness and “God” Pt. 7

Created January 13, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Chapter Four

The Singularity

The moment in which The One Self becomes self-aware needs to be explained. Why did this singularity occur? Why had it never occurred before?

And what was it? If all that had existed was nothingness, something in the nothingness constituted possibility. 

The writer has come to picture this in two different ways, with and without Time:

The One Self has always existed and will always exist and is the only thing that exists. It has a waking/sleeping cycle. Every time it wakes up there is no memory at first. Perhaps there is a big bang every time The Self wakes up. The expanding universe reaches a certain point then begins to close back on itself into the sleep cycle. As if the Universe is breathing. In multiverse universe-sheaf imagery each Universe may manifest this differently.

The other way I visualize it is that all time exists at once, and the multiverse effect is compounded by different free will decisions in each starting universe.

Perhaps both views are true and co-exist, depending on how The One Self looks at it. All of this is for the enjoyment of The One Self. With infinite or virtually infinite computing power, The One Self could easily see itself both ways at once, with Time sequence or all-happening-at-once.

The design enables The One Self to pay special attention to minute details within HisHerSelf. Each of us is a special adventure-comedy-romance-drama story unfolding within the grand scheme of things, and what we experience as our “self” is actually The One Self.

How can that be?

Picture the singularity which appeared out of nothingness as a spark. That spark might be likened to a subatomic particle. However we posit it to have characteristics we do not normally associate with leptons, mesons, and bosons. Let’s call it a “psion” meaning that it has access to “psychic powers” as broadly defined to include the basic psychic power which is called “consciousness”. Consciousness itself is a psychic power. The most distinguishing characteristic that a psion has is its sustained ability to know itself to be an experiencer, and even in the absence of stimuli is able to experience thinking, feeling, envisioning, imagining, having hunches, intending, planning, anticipating…

It’s acknowledged that these are amazing powers in themselves, especially from the viewpoint of the moment in time just before the first psion existed. We will address “extrasensory perception” in the next Chapter.

Once there are multiple psions, they can interact with one another, providing stimuli one to the other.

Leibniz had a similar thought and his name for the conscious entities was “monads”. 

Technically, what we postulate is happening when The One Self creates an offspring of The Original Psion, is that The One Self teleports a copy of itself with certain functionalities withheld, to a place in spacetime, where that creature beings a series of lives, moving up the evolutionary chain to a higher and higher being life to life depending on speed of learning.

Interestingly, this has a resemblance to one of Wheeler’s theories, which was that all electrons are actually the same electron at different stages in its life. That Wheeler theory also has a nexus to Plato and his concept of there being a higher level of Universe where the ideal images of archetypal things exist. Consiliency of ideas across thinkers is suggestive evidence of probable truth. 

Although we do not know yet if this is the way reality really is, so far we can claim that there is a degree of agreement between our theory and the existing orthodox standard theory of physics today. Psions become part of the family of subatomic particles/wavicles. Consciousness is the field created around the particular psion. Each psion is actually the same singular spark of experiencing that noticed HisHerSelf at the beginning of the Universe.

This explains why consciousness (the observer) is so important in Einstein’s and Wheeler’s cosmologies. Recall that Wheeler indicated that matter-energy by itself can only have a shadowy existence until consciousness beholds that matter-energy. That is because the entirety of existence is there to be enjoyed, that is its purpose from the beginning. To be enjoyed by the seasoned experiencer The Original Self and by each of HisHer offspring.

The Universe which contained nothingness now also contains the singularity – the original spark of imagination which bootstrapped itself into a fullness of Universe populated by progeny each inhabited by Itself. The degree of Its own functionality transferred into each spinoff differs, with human level psions having uniqueness, free will, animation, reproduction, agency and other functionalities, which subatomic particles appear not to share. Yet even these particles are psions, they are made out of the only substance that exists, consciousness, and thus they are elemental particles/wavicles of consciousness, manifesting as matter-energy. Although it is all consciousness, some of it appears as matter-energy and some of it such as the thoughts in your head right now are invisible.

John Wheeler also happened to create the first formula by which light can be bound into matter. In Jewish cosmology and in the Bible, the first matter-energy that the first point of self-awareness creates, is light. Everything else in the world of matter-energy is a modulation of that original light.

At the human level of consciousness, we not only are consciousness (also manifesting physical bodies exhibiting some degree of energy) but we also through imagination and follow-through can turn our imaginings into matter-energy forms which other psions can appreciate. 

Jung was one of the thinkers who postulated the possible existence of a collective unconscious, where all human minds touch one another in a pool. Our theory is similar except that the collective consciousness contains everything in the Universe.

Bishop Berkeley had theories similar to the one we present here. He also described a way of being in which one sees oneself as being the only thing that exists, with everything else imaginary. This is called solipsism. Our theory would then be a species of universal solipsism, where even one’s own self is imaginary, and the Imaginer is the secret identity of all psions.

The functionalities which we describe in the process of The One Self building the Universe of beings and things call to mind familiar phenomena we observe in the natural world. Amoebas split off a part of themselves to create progeny; The One Self does the same. As mentioned earlier, octopi by their multiple brains are equipped to experience multiple selves, one for each tentacle, and the same could be true of other creatures here and on other planets. In humans there are many documented cases of split personality. Some species such as ants, bees and termites may experience groupminds, and watching a flight of birds or a school of fish move as one, suggests that such a phenomenon could be an on/off option available for more evolved species.  

These known phenomena demonstrate that consciousness is even more complicated than it seems, and that under certain conditions, psions may be able to share their consciousness. This is the subject of the next Chapter.

Love to all,

Bill

 

Visit Us On FacebookVisit Us On TwitterVisit Us On LinkedinVisit Us On Youtube

The Meaning of Life: A Theory of Everything including Consciousness and “God” Pt. 6

Created January 6, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Chapter Three

How Could One Imagination Create a Universe of So Many Beings?

Consciousness itself is a form of information processing. The closest analogy would be to call consciousness an energy computer, a computer made out of energy.

The consciousness level of a human being could never do all the things that the theoretical First Self has demonstrated in the universe we confront. We are limited to some degree by the physical constraints of our brain and nervous system. However even were we to be separated entirely from our body and discover that our consciousness still exists, if that is the case, it appears unlikely that we would at once have the functionality of mind to encompass the view into the inner perspective of all conscious beings in the universe simultaneously. Why is this so?

Human beings can partition their minds to a limited extent. In playing the piano, for example, the left hand and the right hand are doing different things at the same time. And creatures who are thought to be less intelligent than humans, such as octopi, have a brain in each tentacle, suggesting that each arm-leg might have its own sense of self which the whole creature is also able to experience through the sub-brains.

But living through each mind in the universe is a far more daunting task. As we know ourselves today, we would not be prepared for the experience of suddenly being able to see out the eyes and other sensory equipment of every mind in the universe. What we would probably experience in that situation would be complete overload, a chaos of unintegrated fleeting thoughts, feelings, images and impulses. It would likely be quite unpleasant.

What accounts for this vast difference in mental capacity? It possibly comes down to the amount of energy accessible by the mind in question. A human consumes and expends a few thousand calories worth of energy each day. The total universe production of energy per human 24-hour day is almost infinitely larger. The First Self must have always had energy on that scale. Being able to imagine many creatures and then enter them to live through them – with or without memory of being The First Self while in the creature – and to be able to enjoy the multiplicity of lives all at once is sign of infinite or virtually infinite attention span.

The First Self may have created beings vastly more mentally capable than we are, we just haven’t met them yet. Or their existence has yet to have been documented as fact.

It could also be that living through creatures with certain degrees of mental constraint – and doing so with no memory of actually being The One Self – enables The One Self to enjoy more powerful experiences with zero sense of them being just imaginary. Whereas from His/Her original perspective, it may be all too obvious that all of it is just imaginary.

Speculating further, the personas created by experiencing many lives sequentially (if that is what is going on) could create complex personalities that The One Self could enjoy as companions or “apprentices” over vast periods of time.

The One Self could help these avatars learn how to handle more simultaneous inputs and challenging ethical questions that would make it safer to allow them to be born into beings of greater power.

At the end of a long course of instruction and demonstration, a self that has accumulated wisdom and understanding over many lifetimes in an ascending array of levels of being (powers of mind), that such a self could be reabsorbed into The One Self as a conscious subself, a personality aspect imbued with the deep learning of experience.

If this is the sort of game the Universe is playing, even at our limited human level we can understand and appreciate the Universe’s motives. We are witnessing The Play Of Consciousness – the title of a wonderful book by Swami Muktananda. But simply the fact that it is playful does not mean that it is mere entertainment. The Universe is its own art form. It is aesthetically beautiful.

The theory that consciousness came first and created matter-energy – what I call The Theory of the Conscious Universe – is very close to the theories put forth by all Eastern spiritual traditions such as Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism, and virtually identical to Kashmir Shaivism – except that the language the writer uses today is closer to the language of Western science. This is on purpose. The writer’s intent is to persuade the reader to open-mindedly consider the possibility – and perhaps probability – that something like the scenarios painted here is the real truth about what the universe is.

What about Western spiritual traditions? To what extent does The Theory of the Conscious Universe square with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?

All of these Western spiritual traditions stem from the founder’s experiences of communicating directly with The One Self and/or with beings more powerful than ourselves who serve The One Self.

The founder in each case teaches that consciousness continues after the death of the body.

And the main message is to do kindness continuously, and to seek to do what The One Self (whom they call God or Allah) teaches.

In certain branches including Jewish Kabbalists, Christian Quakers, and Islam in general, allowing The One Self to take over control of one’s body and mind is a specific teaching.

In at least these four specific areas – receiving guidance from above, consciousness survival after death, the importance of continuous kindness, and surrendering to control by The One Self – the Theory of the Conscious Universe lines up very well with spiritual traditions on Earth.

Love to all,

Bill

 

Visit Us On FacebookVisit Us On TwitterVisit Us On LinkedinVisit Us On Youtube

The Meaning of Life: A Theory of Everything including Consciousness and “God” Pt. 3

Created December 16, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Chapter One Continued

How Can We Reconcile “God” with Science?

Because of the habits of the human mind, especially in a culture in which humans have created more complexity than our minds can easily handle, we find that as a first step it may be useful to temporarily set aside the word “God” and speak only of a conscious, intelligent universe.

It is far easier for today’s human mind to deal objectively with the possibility that something as big and as filled with inanimate objects as the universe could itself have a mind, than to discuss a word so saddled with millennia of baggage associations. The word itself looses emotions, chemicals in the body, muscular reactions, imagery, feelings beyond description. Let’s park the word and continue the investigation of where we are at the crossroads of life and self-extermination and how it relates to our thinking and ways of being.

Wheeler again has theorized that consciousness is a real thing and has vast importance in the scheme of things in this universe we live in. Consciousness according to Wheeler transforms a universe of probabilities into a world of tangible matter and energy events. Science has not rejected Wheeler’s ideas.

It has largely ignored them. That is, science has ignored the Wheeler ideas that have a bearing on the existence of consciousness as an important aspect of the universe. Science has certainly not ignored Wheeler’s other ideas about black holes, nuclear fission, thermonuclear fusion, quantum foam, wormholes, etc.

Given the respect for Wheeler and the non-rejection of his theories about consciousness and the universe, it should not be too difficult to get scientists to accept the possibility that Wheeler was right about everything, except perhaps the sequence of early universe events. The writer’s own theory is that Wheeler was incorrect about consciousness coming after the beginning of the universe. It makes more sense to the writer that consciousness was there before matter and energy, and compelled them to come into existence.

How to Defend the Idea that Consciousness Came First

Any cosmological theory faces the challenge of explaining why there is a universe at all. Logic suggests that nothing should ever have existed. Something cannot come from nothing. Therefore, there must always have been something.

In scientific thought today, it is Wheeler’s quantum foam of probabilities that was always there. Then the big bang came from that, and eventually crashing matter and energy led to self-reproducing complex structures accidentally, and those eventually became life, and life eventually brought forth brains, and brains generated consciousness.

Is the writer the only one who feels that this picture seems overly optimistic about what accidents can do?

Not to mention the question of where did the quantum foam of probabilities come from.

Science has made it a tradition to dodge these questions of how things started.

Glimmers of light appear from time to time. Today most physicists acknowledge that “the hard question” is how to incorporate consciousness properly in the unified theory of everything. This is the direction from which science can begin to theorize about the start of the universe.

A Possibility to Consider

Let’s imagine what it could have been like before what we experience as the universe existed.

Imagine total nothingness. No quantum foam probabilities, no anything. Just endless nothingness.

Imagine that after the passage of unimaginable amounts of time, that the nothingness realizes itself as a self, noticing a persistent experience of nothingness.

The time that has passed is merely the subjective experience of nothingness that has always existed in the mind of the Noticer.

“The nothingness has always existed, it exists right now, and will probably go on existing forever,” might have been the first intuition of the Noticer.

“I AM THAT nothingness” might have been the next intuition the Noticer had.

“I am the Nothing’s imagination”, might have been the third intuition.

That Consciousness could have continued to think and found it to be more fun than just watching nothing happen forever.

Why did the writer just slip in initial capital letters to “Noticer” and “Consciousness”? If we are considering a scientific proposition regarding a theoretical consciousness of the universe itself, it seems proper respect to use initial caps.

Does this automatically mean that all of the connotations of “God” are to be assumed of the consciousness of the universe? Not necessarily.

What we are suggesting is that it is if nothing else simpler to assume that a persistent experience of nothingness could lead to the experiencer realizing that it exists as an observer – than to imagine that a quantum foam of probabilities existed, exploded, and things slammed against each other until this world we see around us in lightyears in all directions came to be in all its wondrous complexity, eventually created consciousness, the ability to perceive oneself as a persistent entity which experiences things.

The Better of Two Bootstraps

The standard model at the moment is that a complex physical form evolved from random collisions we call The Replicator Molecule, and thus life came to exist.

The model we present here is similar in that it starts with random information bits representing nothingness, assembling a self-referential viewpoint, a permanent memory-creating self.

One would argue that it is less implausible to envision random information becoming a self-organizing system than it is to envision random collisions of matter-energy building any complex physical thing let alone one that is also a factory for others of its kind.

What Would You Do If You Were the First Self?

There you are, you just realized that you exist at all, and you are alone amidst nothingness.

You might think and think and think and at some point, come to the conclusion that you and imagination are one and the same.

This might lead to experimentation as to how far you could go just by imagining things. How intensely could you visualize something else besides nothingness. How real could you make your imaginings seem to you.

After all, once having become consciously self-aware, were you going to simply accept nothingness as your way of life forever? Or would you want to at least try for other things?

What else was there to do but to explore one’s own capabilities? How far could imagination be pushed?

Never A Beginning

Although the better of two bootstraps appeals to me, a simpler theory is that it has always been this way. There never was a beginning.

In the writer’s present theory, time itself is not intrinsic to the One Consciousness, who has the computing power to experience all time at once. Time is part of the imaginary world the One Consciousness creates and inhabits through its avatars.

The expanding universe since the Big Bang suggests a cycle similar to an inbreath alternating with an outbreath, with all of creation sucked back into the Creator for what might be a sleep cycle, followed by a reawakening.

Love to all,

Bill

 

Visit Us On FacebookVisit Us On TwitterVisit Us On LinkedinVisit Us On Youtube

The Meaning of Life: A Theory of Everything including Consciousness and “God” Pt. 1

Created December 2, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The Meaning of Life
A Theory of Everything including Consciousness and “God” Pt. 1

As we transition from one year to the next, I’ll be sharing with you here a serialization of my newest shortest book The Meaning of Life: A Theory of Everything including Consciousness and “God”. I wrote this short book mainly for physicists but also for everyone. I’d like physicists to accept the scientific possibility of something very much like God, and to prioritize the subject. This book explains why. Hope you enjoy it and feel what Freud called “the Oceanic feeling”. –Bill

Preface

It is long past time to discuss the ultimate questions. We set those questions aside because things were interesting enough in the world of the senses and the everyday pleasures.

Now when things have gotten rough and the existential challenges are many, we remember that homework not done. Now we need the answers to why we are keeping up on our daily routines, in order to have the guts to stand up and do whatever it takes to overcome all the new challenges.

Inner Life

From the start, many of us could not shake off a strong compulsion to know more about who we are and why we are here.

Early aspirants to self-knowledge attained high levels of sophistication in contemplation of the self, remembering key ideas from generation to generation as lyrics in songs. Spirit and mind were regarded as the same thing then, so that psychology and spirituality were in the same category. Most of these key ideas being saved relate to the Oneness of all things. The Rig Veda, Egyptian Book of the Dead, Torah, Tao Te Ching are classic examples.

Science ought to consider this as evidence of a long-running human intuition that there is a far greater intelligence overseeing the universe, and that we are all parts of That. Just because almost everyone at some point experiences such an intuition does not prove that there is anything scientific about it. However, it is a reason to keep an open mind. Science is supposed to do that all the time anyway, the only exception appears to be in this one subject domain, “God”. As if a flinch reaction to having been “deluded” by it for so many millennia – that is the implied script. Hopefully most scientists do have open minds. Because this subject needs more attention stat.

The “inner life” tradition continued alongside every step forward we made in “outward” science and technology. In the world of 2022, meditation and yoga are practiced worldwide, and represent the 101 course of self-examination and thought experiments into what the world might be. The most advanced thinkers of every Age gave us (sometimes only through their followers) the findings of their own inner explorations.

For 6000 years of written history describing as far back as 10,000 BC based upon oral “records”, the ideas of materialism and spiritualism were always of nearly equal importance in explaining people’s behavior. That healthy balance took an odd turn a few hundred years ago and there has been a shrinkage first in the average person’s own spirituality, and then in the outward self-identification people give in surveys. This last drop took place only in the past 20 years, in which self-proclaimed spirituality (an exaggeration of true spirituality) dropped for example in the U.S. from 90% to 70%.

Eisenhower’s speech as he left office described Americans as “a free and religious people”. The absurdity of saying that in 2022 is obvious. The daily news paints all of humanity as running amok. People invoke God to sanctify deeds of extreme hostility. They must be thinking of the old vengeful images of God we first had while hiding in caves.

The “hip” thing to say since around 1970 is a bit like “I believe in something – some kind of force – it may be nothing like us – it may not care about us – but it is there.” This is the way to announce that you are a spiritual, and therefore a good, person. That is another concept of God.

The deists who founded the USA believed that whatever God was, was supremely benevolent, had our best interests at heart, and the teachings of Judeo-Christianity and Islam well described what God would want of us, for our own good. We trust in God. Even though we don’t know what “He” is.

Except that nowadays, even with the social pressure to go along with the herd, a third of us boldly state that we don’t trust God or acknowledge that “He” exists.

Eisenhower was not alone in his association of spirituality with the economic, social, and political success of a nation. He did trust God. A plausible social science theorem would be that the degree of law and order in a culture is predicted by its degree of trust in God.

All of this by way of explaining why a short book like this had to be written.

If we are to trust God in this modern cynical age where we are mostly ruled by violent mood swings, we cannot avoid discussing the nature of God within a scientific framework. If God cannot be reconciled within science, the game is over. The denouement shall not be pretty. The cards are stacked against us. Hedonism, material accidentalism, cynicism, selfishness, ego, scarcity of wealth (only a few have it), power, hate, racism, misogynism, xenophobia, fear, weapons of mass destruction, collapsing environment, dying species, fiat money, superficial education systems, unmoderated systems of social mass communication, all of which are the self-destructive negative forms of creative expression in the absence of spirituality.

The Benefits New Science Can Bring

If science shows that “God” is on the scientific agenda, humanity shall experience the strongest upsurge in positive emotion in hisandherstory. Science’s acknowledgement of possibilities very similar to the existence of God makes each of us important again. We were important enough to have been created by something like God. Life is important, has great meaning, is not to be treated frivolously.

Better behavior will steadily take over. Working together in a friendly way will become the norm. Doing things that you enjoy shall be the employment principle, inspiration and creativity and compromise shall all blossom, love will flower.

What Exactly Is Needed

These are the upside benefits to humanity if science decides that there is no scientific basis for ruling out a benevolent God whom we are right to trust. And taking a fresh look through the lens of science at how consciousness might be related to matter and energy, for that is the experimental direction to determining what “God” there truly is.

A “fresh” look means not again and again solving for the matter-energy quantum brain phenomena which generate the epiphenomenon of consciousness. But explaining why we experience consciousness, why there is Flow state, why there are other states of consciousness and powers of mind that come and go.

And theoretical scientists are needed to focus on all of the possibilities for how the universe came to be, without any presuppositions.

For example, could Wheeler’s first cause “quantum foam of probabilities” exist within a consciousness?

A Role for Individuals 

There is a second experimental path for individuals described in the last Chapter of this book. How an individual can test various ways of using his or her own consciousness, and observe what the results might be. These results may not be of use to science, but could turn out to give you useful new tools and possibly even a profound spiritual feeling.

Love to all,

Bill

 

Visit Us On FacebookVisit Us On TwitterVisit Us On LinkedinVisit Us On Youtube