Consciousness as Fundamental to the Cosmos & Limits of Math
My Philosophical Backing
When we name something, we are giving that “thing” a form. At a broader level, having a word always indicates form. After all, how can someone look at a fruit and call it “apple” without it taking an apple form, right?
When we say something has a form, what are we subtly implying? That it also has boundaries. That some “thing” is contained.
When we think of container, we think of what can be contained. How do we think of what can be contained? By thinking of the container’s limitations.
Based on our above inductive reasoning, when we are talking about the word, human, we are also subconsciously admitting that we are limited. Why is acknowledging this important?
Throughout our childhoods and even adult lives, we’ve been given great tools from Reading Rainbow to Bill Nye to the Discovery Channel so we can understand how science works via the scientific method. (I have a blog post on how we need to change the scientific method here). Observation, measurement, and consistency in replicability are key players in deciding whether something can be proven or disproven. The part we’re not saying out loud is that it needs to be observed, measured, and consistent in replicability to only human standards, and that the concept of being proven or disproven is merely to humans. You may ask why this even matters, because humans are the ones creating, building, destroying, rebuilding, inventing, and are communicating within their groups at what is deemed the “highest level” on our planet.
Consciousness.
Consciousness is that subjective force that challenges an otherwise objective sense of reality lots of sub-communities elude themselves to believe. Consciousness being subjective has not only caused an unfortunate dismissal, at the macro level, of its legitimacy as the very foundation from which all in the cosmos arises, but also, at the micro level, for each individual because it is mistakenly grouped in with emotions and thoughts, which we see as ephemeral and unique, not as concrete reality, not as objective truth. Okay, I can understand that everyone’s experience (which I consider the manifest form of consciousness, I don’t necessarily see consciousness itself as a manifest thing) is a subjective phenomenon, but if everyone experiences the same-but-different subjectivity, does it not call for consideration that this is an objective part of reality?
Coming back to the point of being called human: to be human is to be limited, which means we cannot truly know everything, as our knowledge is capped at what our senses can allow us to learn and what the ceiling cognitive and creative capabilities of our mind can allow us to create that can sense beyond us.
To take it a step further, I do not like having a theory of everything, but rather, a theory of the same something in everything.
In quantum physics, we have the idea that upon observation, reality takes form. Our perception shapes our spacetime. What exists in a state of superposition can theoretically never be pulled down into human enough form for us to understand. Between the worlds of linear and non-linear spacetime, where’s the line? When I think of line, I think of outlines, like the boundaries of form, and if we remember the form of human, then the line might literally be where being human ends and where being…something else begins.
To be blunt, we’d have to be dead. Through death, our consciousness can be unbounded from our mortal coils.
Think about what it means to move through time.
At time t = 0, you might have your tomato on a cutting board.
At time t = 1, you open a drawer.
At time t = 2, you grab your knife.
At time t = 3, you cut your first slice.
…and so on and so forth.
So what’s going on from t = 0 to t = 3? Notice we work in linear time to describe reality. We’ve discussed so much about observing data in the scientific method and usually data has a manifest form of something. Might be a good time to introduce experiential data. Experience: the manifest form of consciousness. Manifest (anything): data that humans can work with. I’m defining experiential data with 6 parameters: data input from the 5 senses + personal interpretation. When you consider your reality is rendering a background and foreground image, light and shadows, smells, sensations, and sounds, coupled with your personal projections, biases, ongoing processes, you realize that your mind is handling quite a bit of information.
Tell me, can you experience EVERYTHING in your reality with its data from time t = 0, 1, 2, and 3 all collapsed into one moment? While you open a drawer, are you also grabbing a knife at the same time, and also cutting a slice all at once? No. And that’s why human consciousness experiences life linearly.
Information that can only be processed at one unit of time at a time (linear: past, present, future). Experiential data for each quanta of time would probably require storage beyond our capacity to wrap our minds around large numbers, but those moments in time are going to be happening anyways. Time waits for no one. If the time passes anyways, experiential data is being logged at each unit, and there’s a guarantee that for some nonzero value of time that you will exist, then where does your consciousness sit in all of this? Who are you? Or better yet, when are you?
This is where the idea that the consciousness housed in you right now isn’t all of your consciousness. The rest of your consciousness exists outside of linear spacetime. As we move through time, consciousness explores itself in all of its permutations. Something to think about: what is nonlinear you? Hint: it’s in the first word of this website’s title ;)
So why am I claiming consciousness to be the fabric of the cosmos, if, as human beings there’s no way to know everything considering that the moment we know something, we have perceived it, thus causing decoherence, disabling access to the root of that phenomenon? What do we do when we can’t observe, measure, and forget, replicate? Everything leaves a trace. If something isn’t the truth, then there is no sign of impact, there’s no trace, and there are no results. If consciousness is truly the foundation, if the cosmos are truly conscious, if everything within the cosmos is also conscious, then there will be traces and there will be results. Which is why I have chosen to take on the task of attempting to prove consciousness as fundamental truth by working backwards from traces and results.
Discrete Math & Backwards Reasoning
From my time at Georgia Tech, I remember one of the principles I enjoyed in my discrete math class was proof by contradiction. Assume the negation of what you want to prove and work backwards.
Proof by Contradiction
Let’s say: C = Consciousness as fundamental
Assume ¬C (not C, assume consciousness is not fundamental)
To even be able to understand that statement, you needed awareness. You could say that that is enough to disprove the statement.
Not only that, but how could we even do truth assignment? How can we create operationally defined variables? Those things only bear fruit from reasoning and value iff (if and only if) there is a conscious observer to perceive it.
“But Shivani, isn’t the awareness to read that sentence coming from a purely human standpoint? How are you using that to say consciousness is fundamental to things lower than us?” (eyeroll at suggesting other species are “lower” than us)
You would be correct. We start finding holes in mathematics being used right here, realizing that we as humans created mathematics to find order in the universe. If consciousness is fundamental, then proof is simply one mode by which it reflects itself. It doesn’t need to be universally legible, just consistent with the structure it emerges from. Regardless, let’s continue.
Let’s examine an inanimate object like a rock.
When you are observing your reality, you are in a field of awareness. If you spot a rock, then this rock exists. What does it mean for something to exist? That it is within the field of awareness/can be observed. This doesn’t mean that the rock has to have political opinions, romantic feelings, etc.; but rather, that the same things that make up the properties for you to view something are the same properties that go into that rock. So rather than consciousness being inside the rock, both the rock and the thought of the rock are inside consciousness.
Awareness is a necessary precondition for inanimate objects to “exist”.
Whenever there’s an experience like something appearing, we can conceptually separate it into subject (the knower) and object (the known) via impact of maya, Sanskrit for illusion/illusory reality. But that separation is descriptive, not structural. Inside the experience itself, there’s just one unified event: knowing.
If you are still frustrated about how this doesn’t indicate that the rock is conscious, fret not, because me, too. What you’re likely thinking of is self-awareness (very common to humans), having the ability to self-reflect, to have ego/id, to be able to say “I”, and this is a natural evolution with consciousness gaining complexity and calcifying into matter (more on this in a second).
Proof by Contrapositive
Conditional statement: If p —> q (If I brush my teeth, my breath is fresh)
Contrapositive statement: If ¬q —> ¬p (If my breath isn’t fresh, then I didn’t brush my teeth)
Remember when I talked about traces and results? If consciousness exists, traces of its existence and operation must be detectable. We can define these traces simply with coherence, symmetry, self-organization, informational flow.
We observe those traces ubiquitously: physical laws, biological homeostasis, mental meaning
Therefore, by the contrapositive:
If no consciousness, no coherence.
Coherence exists. Therefore, consciousness exists.
On Spacetime —> Matter —> Consciousness
The most widely held belief right now is that awareness is an emergent property of physical complexity like integrated systems of neurons, but how can the theory bridge the gap between an objective truth of “neurons firing” and subjective truth of “I feel pain” when awareness is what made it even possible to know neurons are firing?
Where do we go from here?
Your whole architecture is your mind, your body, and your consciousness (or you can refer to it as your soul, your essence, etc.) You are not only the mind. You are not only the body. Even with the concept of a soul, I find it to be consciousness with a personality. At the core, you are awareness, but let’s not get lost in spiritual/ontological bypassing.
In order to know what seems unknowable, we must expand ourselves entirely, and that creates a whole new reality. Sometimes the proof isn’t so cut and dry. In fact, even some of the discrete math topics I mentioned talk about cause and effect, which indicate past to present or present to future, but basically speak in linear time. So even in this way, the reasoning tools of math are limited. The meta-breaths, macro breaths, and micro breaths (spanda: vibration —> creation, preservation and destruction) of your whole architecture (your mind, body, and consciousness) must be aligned in the ultimate breath, the breath of the cosmos, its spanda, so well that the traces and results are the fabric of your reality itself, which will be unique to you.
Once again why I suggest that we don’t have a theory of everything, but rather, the same something in everything. That same something is within you, within me, within us all, and it is up to us to awaken and remember who we are. There is nothing to do, there is only who to become. When we realize consciousness generates spacetime and not the other way around, we gain empowerment, and with this knowledge, work together to build a better tomorrow.