The Question of Consciousness

Is consciousness a layer on top of physical reality, or is the physical a layer on top of consciousness?

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”

Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

We don’t really understand consciousness

Currently we understand consciousness to be the quality or state of being aware, yet due to consciousness being such a varied experience and still sitting at the fringes of scientific understanding, this definition falls short - we are missing pieces of the puzzle.

For a very long time, a known practice of monks is to be completely in the moment, every day. This is an incredibly involved task - full focus on one part of life is constantly being barraged by an onslaught of distracting thoughts, an easy plunge into past or future thinking, or having multiple senses: your sight, touch, smell, taste, to be preoccupied at the same time.

"there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

— Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

The act of distraction allows a moment to be worse. As they say, depression is when you live in the past and anxiety is when you live in the future.

No moment is tedious when you experience it fully.

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”

— Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

A feeling that I attempt to chase each day is the flow state. This is a moment when the rest of the world falls away and focus dials on in. The main occasions I am able to go into this state are through programming: all thoughts are focused on solving a problem and the hours pass without notice, or by running. In these moments, I feel like my body is surging with potential: I could run forever! These are the some of the states when I am most alive and conscious of the moment.

Normal distribution of how often people feel the moment

As with everything, this experience can be viewed as a normal distribution curve, monks are amongst those focus of the moment the most and the rest of the world’s population spread along the rest of the curve. The leftmost side of the curve consists of a population who let their moments get swept away. Closer to the right side, you will find people who’s moments will feel a little longer and more real, and in the middle of the curve, individuals will dip in and out of awareness.

It follows that focus is the essence of consciousness, with the passing of time being all but shifts in focus.

There is a mind bending thought that life is a video game and that your consciousness is just a guy that sat down to play. They got so engrossed in the game that their world fell away and when you died they snapped back to reality, o yeah it was just a game…

This is an intense version of focus; so intense you forget the world around you for 55 years.

Have you ever had a dream that felt so real that when you woke up you had to remind yourself that in this world you have not just jumped off a cliff hoping to fly but are instead tucked into warm sheets?

Is it such a stretch to question whether this life is all but a dream, a moment of focus?

Humans are not the only ones conscious

Personally, I know that I think, and therefore I am, which means all I can draw are assumptions based on the behaviour of other humans, that they also have a conscious experience. On one side, this thinking heads in the direction that I am the only one conscious, an idea called solipsism; still, Occam's razor would have us cut that reasoning short since there are more assumptions necessary for solipsism to be the case than for it to not be the case. That the entire reality is a projection of one mind with no external cause and no empirical method of measurement? We should explore other avenues.

Animals exhibit awareness, yet does an individual need to exhibit awareness to be conscious? In the same way that I cannot know if a dog is aware since I am not that dog, how can I assume that a rock, tree, or table do not have some sort of conscious experience?

— Excerpt from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984) by Douglas Adams, Book 4 of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series

With the epoch of AI, the question of whether it is aware has popped up more and more. There is no consensus that AI is conscious, but there are parallels between observable human behaviour - my only indicator of whether they are conscious, and the observable actions of AI. Beings that need energy, can communicate based on patterns and probabilities and react to external stimuli both fit humans and AI. If behaviour is the only indicator, where does the boundary lie between conscious and not? When we hit AGI, by definition, the AI possesses human-level cognitive ability, but when will we know it’s hit AGI?

When it screams let me out?

Within a collective of humans, conscious behaviour can emerge. Despite no single human making the decision behind a group action, it is intentional. This emergence is visible in a company or the public consciousness. What is more striking is the collective focus on an idea can impact the individuals within it. A example of this collective virality is the spike in cases of anorexia in the 1970s. Despite it being around for so much longer - the earliest record being in the 1600s, individuals who perhaps would never have had anorexia if they had never learned of the idea, were now greatly affected. Later that century, the cases declined. It’s as if ideas themselves have agency - able to infect, influence, and vanish - within the mind of the crowd.

So we have established that philosophically, one could argue that everything from a grain of sand to the stock market is conscious. And in fact, this is the oldest belief system in human history - that everything possesses a spiritual essence, the water, the trees, the rocks - the animation of nature.

What I find fascinating about this idea is that if everything is aware, then the atoms, chemicals, cells and organs that make up you are little groups of consciousnesses, which calls into question how much your conscious ‘self’ makes decisions.

If you get a craving for chocolate and decide to walk to the store to buy some, did you make that decision or did something else?

The bacteria in your gut can produce neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine to influence your mood, they can affect your cravings especially for foods they thrive on such as fat and sugar and they can send signals straight to your brain through the gut-brain axis. So did you want that chocolate, or did they?

NPCs

The belief that all things are aware in to some level, also brought along another belief: that a person could be born or exist as an empty shell: not conscious or without a soul. This arose from the the idea that a soul could be damaged, stolen or lost.

Even today, this idea is a propagates through popular culture as a meme - the real-life npc: a non player character in video games.

Someone who acts in a pre-programmed manner, they talk and move but have no introspection.

Whether this is true or not, it does make you think about certain interactions…

Jokes aside, in the 1990s the philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers coined the term philosophical zombie to describe something very much like the real life NPC as an argument against the physical reality we see.

He said that if the physical reality is all that is real, then consciousness should be explained by physical behaviour. But because we can conceive of a p-zombie - something physically identical to us yet lacking consciousness - consciousness must be above the physical or that the physical theory of reality is incomplete in its explanation.

To explore this possibility, that consciousness is not explained by our current physical model, we have to delve into altered states of mind and what they tell us about reality. There is no complete conversation about consciousness without these states of mind because they have been at the center of it all this time.

Altered States

Almost every culture across history has experienced and explored these altered states of consciousness. This is not usual scientific practice but it is telling how many have taken this journey of exploration and the similarity in their outcomes. These states would have been reached through the use of substances or meditation. And while they tend to be kept private to avoid judgement, they are so incredibly profound that at first it is difficult to conceive that they are not a bigger part of the mainstream culture. But then, perhaps counterculture makes for creativity - if they were mainstream they would not be so enlightening, but a watered-down version.

These altered states were reached so frequently across the world that there is an interesting thread where religion and psychedelics intertwine: they both guide you to look at your life and help you live a better one.

I often see the Bible being interpreted as: you must live well now, for the afterlife. Yet, when the interpretation becomes less that God is a being in the sky and more in line with his omniscience and omnipotence, as in he is in everything and that life with all its ups and downs is God and sometimes life is beautiful and sometimes it is rough but you can’t blame one guy in the sky; I interpret each of these stories as moral lessons and, that the writers, based on all their experience of this life decided to pass their advice down. Just a few of these moral lessons are: how to work well as a team or don’t mess up your life or how you should try to do your best in this world or that a good marriage can be the foundation of achieving dreams or how to find meaning or the importance of a loving family in your life. They knew that doing these would allow you to live a good life, even a fantastic or heavenly life, but the story also told you that when you live a bad life you are punished constantly, a hellish punishment, really.

I heard an interpretation recently that put forward: psychedelics act in a similar way to how religion does. If you are not living with purpose and focus, being in an altered state will allow you to see the raw reality - whether you are in heaven or in hell. And what links this to religious experiences, across all religions, is that people sound like they were experiencing altered states.

"And their whole body, their backs, their hands, their wings, and the wheels were full of eyes all around - the wheels that the four of them had."

— Ezekiel 10:12

This is one such experience where Ezekiel describes a vision in which God reveals divine truths to him a He leaves the temple in Jerusalem. This retelling is incredibly similar to modern accounts of altered states where everything is composed entirely of eyes - some have interpreted this as the state of being aware that we are aware - the universe looking back at itself. It is interesting how other religions developed alongside meditation and the exploration of altered states, for example, in later Buddhism, monks describe the nine consciousnesses: our five senses, our mental consciousness, our ego, our karmic imprints influencing our present and future, and finally, the state of enlightenment. It’s interesting that Buddhism, Hinduism and Daoism all hold the exploration of consciousness at their core, but Abrahamic religions focus a lot less on that, especially in the mainstream.

The artwork coming up was crafted by Alex Grey, an artist and philosopher who recreates what he sees when exploring altered states - turning them into masterpieces of art. Since people who have taken psychedelics tend to have a difficult time remembering exactly what they saw, as the memories slip away so quickly, these pieces capture a realm of life that is almost impossible to illustrate.

LSD

St. Albert & The LSD Revolution - Alex Grey

What people have found is that throughout their life they naturally dig themselves into a rabbit hole, an echo chamber, a prison - it’s how they see and understand the world. But “acid” or LSD grabs you and drags you out - like you just crawled out of the cave and saw what was making those lights move on the wall.

The experience lasts around eight hours and is quite analytical and uncomfortable: peeling back the layers of world that you have never questioned and bringing each aspect into sharp focus. We come into this world and are told a lot of things that we just never confirm. You see all of these ideas and you become like a baby and learn it all anew. The moment you choose to focus on acid, maybe a tiny shift of your eyes, allows what you see to become the entire universe - nothing else exists, to you, apart from that. A slice of bread can breathe, a piece of art comes to life, bubbles are more bright and bubbly than possible and people shift between looking normal to being cartoons to godlike entities made up of mist and all eyes, only to then unravel into yarn.

Ego death is the most intense level and you usually have to take a lot to reach it. This is the complete loss of subjective self-identity. Your ego creates a separation between the chair you sit on and yourself, so during ego death there is no separation. You are particles with all the other ones in the universe - there is no I.

But then, just like with soup, is there much separation between each ingredient or is it all soup? This evokes not simply the concept that every possible thing experiences some level of awareness separately, but that it is all the same consciousness, just experienced at different levels.

The Eleusinian Mysteries

The Eleusinian Mysteries were the most secret annual religious rites in ancient Greece and lasted almost 2,000 years, starting in 1600 BCE. It was held by a cult that had Demeter (goddess of agriculture, harvest and fertility) and Persephone (Demeter’s daughter, goddess of spring, vegetation and queen of the underworld) at the centre of their beliefs.

The mysteries included a bath in the sea, three days of fasting and a mysterious central rite - the practice was thought to help prepare for death and live a blessed afterlife.

“Oh, thrice-blessed the mortals who, having contemplated these Mysteries, have descended to Hades; for those only will there be a future life of happiness—the others there will find nothing but suffering.”

— Sophocles Fragment 719, from lost work

The rites were open to all, except those that had committed murder. Aristotle, a known initiate, said the rites were to pathein - to suffer or to experience. The final part of the rite was in the Telesterion, a temple not too far out of Athens that could hold 5,000 people. Things were drawn from baskets which were dreadful to look at. People would also drink kykeon, a barley drink thought to contain ergot, a fungus that LSD was a later synthesised from. Other famous initiates were Plato, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius.

At its height, 3,000 people could have been initiated at one time; in just 500 years that is 1,500,000 people passing through the temple. Imagine over 2,000 years, the hundreds of thousands of people who explored these incredibly mind-bending states, in secrecy. It would be preposterous to sweep away this history as if all these people were under a mass delusion and that this is all there is to it. They were experiencing the raw beauty and terror of life and, with that, they had the feeling of merging with a massive crowd and the unity that came with their shared intention. Such a moment would shift your mindset and view of the entire world; no wonder they felt prepared for what came next.

The First Acid Trip

Dr. Albert Hofmann (1906 - 2008) a Swiss chemist, was the first man to synthesise LSD (and was the man the art piece above was dedicated to - see bottom right corner). In 1938, at his lab, as he was isolating the compounds in ergot, he accidently got a tiny bit of into his bloodstream and he realised he was tripping on his way home. He saw an:

“uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors”

He decided to take more and on the 19th of April 1943, he had a famous bike ride, now known as Bicycle Day.

"I had to struggle to speak intelligibly. I asked my laboratory assistant to escort me home. On the way, my condition began to assume threatening forms. Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror. I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless, my assistant later told me that we had travelled very rapidly."

As you can imagine, he went on to explore this deeply and concluded it was a tool for self-reflection.

“Objective reality, the world view produced by the spirit of scientific inquiry, is the myth of our time.”

Later a different Dr Hoffman, a psychologist and professor at the University of California, came up with an interesting idea that I think follows a similar thread: Conscious Realism. This posits that the physical reality is constructed of agents of consciousness, rather than the physical reality making up consciousness. Interactions among conscious agents give rise to observed structures like the self and external world. He explained that particles are icons for these agents, similar to how the folder icon on your laptop represents the storage area but is not actually in that little area, that is just a way to access the folder’s contents.

LSD is not the only psychedelic out there, yet when other adventures are analysed, they pave the way to a similar conclusion.

Psilocybin

Flesh of the Gods - Alex Grey

This experience is often described as more earthy and emotional than other psychedelics and can last from four to six hours. There may be visuals similar to an acid trip, and the experience will also feel incredibly introspective. Often people will say that the mushroom told them how to live a better life or how best to continue on their path through life.

The first documented empires to use these magic mushrooms were the Aztecs. They called the mushrooms teonanácatl, which can be translated to the flesh of the gods. The Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century witnessed practices of consuming the mushrooms and saw the profound spiritual impact they had on the experiencers. With mushroom use stretching across the Americas, in 2008, researchers found something that pushed the evidence of usage much further back in time. An 1,000-year-old bag in a cave in Bolivia was found to contain instruments to prepare these mushrooms, along with traces of psychoactive plants including psilocybin within them.

Now, the magic mushrooms are just the fruiting body of a few different species of fungus producing psilocybin. In general, fungi are of instrumental importance to the earth’s cycle as they usually decompose dead organic matter. The mycelium - or vegetative part of the fungus - threads itself beneath a forest floor and acts as a guide for the whole forest, transferring nutrients between plants and warning them of dangers. 90-95% of all plants on earth form symbiotic relationships with the mycelium to thrive. Such an incredibly ancient organism that has shaped the world we see today and that gives profound experiences? It is like they want to tell us something.

DMT

Godself - Alex Grey

This psychedelic is often referred to as the businessman's trip: a 15 minute experience. Joe Rogan, a popular American podcaster has been taking DMT for many years, and has had many profound discussions on the topic, one being in this show.

DMT is produced in small quantities in mammals’ brain and lungs, and it has been found that when rats die, the chemical is released in large concentrations in the brain, especially in the visual cortex area. The pineal gland, which looks like a pinecone, has been theorised to release this chemical in animals and what is curious is how this idea has been shrouded in mystery.

It is known that this gland in humans releases melatonin and controls the circadian rhythm. Enzymes have also been found within it that point to the production of DMT - but this is not yet proven.

These theories have led the gland to be referred to as the third eye, a perspective or awareness beyond usual eyesight.

Across ancient cultures, from Egypt to India, Greek philosophy to Catholic symbolism, we see repeated references to a central point of awareness, a perception deeper than the senses. Whether it's the Eye of Horus, the Ajna chakra, or the pineal gland, the idea remains: there may be more to see than what’s in front of our eyes.

One of these references (which some people have proposed is the pineal gland) is in the Vatican - a statue of a pinecone symbolising Roman beliefs about renewal and eternal life:

joerogan

A post shared by @joerogan

“This is a massive pine cone in Rome at the Vatican that represents the pineal gland, flanked by peacocks which represent eternal life. The pineal gland is thought to be the seat of the soul, and it's one of the places where the human body produces DMT, the most potent psychedelic drug known to man. The guide tripped out when I knew what the pine cone symbolized so he and I had a pretty intense conversation about the possible connection Christianity had to the ancient use of psychedelic drugs.”

— Joe Rogan visiting the Vatican

How odd that a chemical produced in our own bodies, when consumed can have such a deep experience that you see exactly what Alex Grey Godself depicts. What, maybe three hits of dmt? And now you are having the most mind bending and eye opening experience of your entire life. Why is that?

What this third eye suggests is that you do not see in the typical sense, through your usual eyes. When the third eye opens you become aware of what you were not aware of before.

Salvia

Salvia is a drug with dissociative effects, meaning you forget you’re on it, which is why it can be described as reality-shattering. On salvia, the person tends to become an inanimate object: a plank of wood, a sofa, a grain of sand, and their subjective experience can last days, weeks, or even years. This is in stark contrast to an observer who would see the user’s trip last only 15 minutes.

Still legal in some countries including the Netherlands, Finland, France, Austria, Indonesia and some states in the USA, the majority of people who try salvia say “I’m glad I had the experience, but I’ll never take it again” - which is possibly why it’s still legal. Here are some fun videos illustrating how it feels: my first salvia trip, that salvia feeling and gnome factory.

He was a ceiling fan for 15 years

“Took a hit of Salvia in a bong for 15 seconds laying alone in my bed. The trip lasted for 27 minutes but felt like 15 actual years. I experienced every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every month of every year without a pause. Everynight, I couldn’t sleep because I was an object so I would just wait at night for them to awaken. I still remember this trip like it was yesterday every single part of it.

After I took the hit I felt like I was coming out of my body then in a flash I was a ceiling fan in the center of a living room. I completely forgot about my life before me and was only aware that I was a ceiling fan. I knew something was wrong and I constantly wanted to escape but I couldn’t tell why, I only knew that my purpose was to be a ceiling fan, only to observe with no feelings.”

In the rest of the story he talks about a family he saw living in the house, how they had a baby and he watched that baby grow up.

These sorts of experiences make you wonder, was that reality or is this reality?

Was he the human pretending to be the fan, or was he a fan pretending to be human?

In a lot of salvia stories where the tripper’s subjective experience lasts for quite a while, they often relay that they forget what it was to be human. That, at that moment, being human was just a weird distant dream and they realised they were always a fan or sofa or a grain of sand.

I suppose when they woke up to this reality, the trip became the weird dream.

You could say it all happened in his head - but everything happens in your head.
Light hits something, bounces into your eyes, and your brain interprets it as vision.
Touch is just nerve signals being sent upstairs. Pain? It is like a stranger annoyingly banging on your door until you open the door and deal with the issue.
Smell is your brain reading floating particles.
Hearing? Vibrations in the air shake your ear, and your brain - like a biological microphone - turns that into sound.

You do not process information about the world outside of your brain.

Here is another story to make you question this reality:

Some coma patients describe experiencing alternate realities whilst they were in the coma and being incredibly disorientated when they wake up. If your brain can “create” a reality this real, how do you know it is not doing that right now?

The Uncertainty Principle

In 1925, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg spent a summer in a remote island in the North Sea called Helgoland where he figured out matrix mechanics - the foundations of quantum physics. Two years later he formulated the uncertainty principle - that we cannot know the position and speed of a particle. When you measure anything, you touch it. When you observe the position of the particle, the photon that bounced off the particle and hit your eye, allowing you to know the position, would have changed the speed of that particle. In the same way, if you know the speed, you cannot know the position. Measuring or observation changes the particle’s state.

What is easy to forget is that these particles are all around - they make up everything and are constantly being touched and changed and measured. Each tiny event can stretch outwards, little shifts turning into ripples turning into waves.

"The flapping of the wings of a butterfly can be felt on the other side of the world."

Let us say it is 1914 in Bosnia and you feel dejected after attempting and failing to murder a man. You decide to take a walk down a road. You hear a rattling over cobblestones and an open-top car turns a corner a passes right in front of you. You reach into your coat and reveal your gun, shooting twice at the passengers: killing the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife instantly.

A tiny decision to go down that street, led to two deaths that resulted in WWI. If there had not been WWI, the Weimar Republic would never have been in a state to start WWII. The two world wars, set in motion by that moment, led to the deaths of 87 to 102 million people. WWII became the founding myth of the west and it still talked about most days. You cannot go very far into the internet without seeing some mention of Hitler or nazis.

The effect of decisions cascade through time.

Every moment is connected to every other moment. You feel separate from the chair you are sitting in but we are all puddles of particles interacting.

When you pass by an unsuspecting door in your home, someone designed that door - most likely multiple people were involved in the decisions of that door: the design, obtaining the materials, building it, bringing the door to you, fitting the door into place in your home. All of us are just particles, bumping into one another, changing state, influencing other particles that are far away, not just in space but also in time.

The Question of Consciousness

Like an ant comprehending a human, the deeper we delve into consciousness, the more we snap a glimpse of a realm of connection that is separate from ourselves due to ourselves.

Alfred Whitehead (1861 - 1947) a mathematician and philosopher, wrote that physical reality is not material or made up of individual matter that exists separate to one another, but instead made up of processes.

It is made up of experiences instead of objects and what is interacted with is a process of becoming, rather than something fixed.

Here is an ancient idea: that an eye cannot observe an eye.

Focus, from the eye’s perspective is all it can do - just watch and be aware of what is happening.

This idea goes beyond our current understanding of the material.

Maybe we are just fragments of awareness - temporary formations in the infinite field of consciousness, watching itself unfold.