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Goswami’s book questions the existence of an “external”, real, objective reality. It is argued that the universe is self-aware and it is consciousness itself that creates the physical world and explains how a single consciousness appears to be so many separate consciousnesses.

Goswami’s book is an attempt to bridge the age-old gap between science and spirituality through a monistic idealism that resolves the paradoxes of quantum physics.

The author of the book is a physicist and professor at the Institute of Theoretical Sciences at the University of Oregon.

INTRODUCTION

When I was studying quantum mechanics as a graduate student, we used to spend hours discussing complex questions like, “Can an electron really be in two places at once?”
I could accept this – yes, an electron can be in two places at the same time: quantum mechanics gives an unambiguous answer to this question, although full of subtleties. But do ordinary objects—say, a chair or a table, those things we call “real”—behave the same way as an electron? Does such an object become a wave, inexorably beginning to spread in a wavelike manner when no one is looking at it?

Objects encountered in our everyday experience do not seem to behave in the strange ways typical of quantum mechanics. So it’s easy for us to unconsciously convince ourselves to think that macroscopic matter is different from microscopic particles—that its ordinary behavior is governed by Newton’s laws, which are called classical physics. Indeed, many physicists stop racking their brains over the paradoxes of quantum physics and surrender to this solution. They divide the world into quantum and classical objects – as I did myself, although I was not aware of what I was doing.

To have a successful career in physics, you can’t think too much about stubborn questions like quantum paradoxes. I’ve been told that the pragmatic way to do quantum physics is to learn to calculate. So I compromised, and the painful questions of my youth gradually faded into the background.

However, they did not disappear. Circumstances changed, and—after the nth bout of stress-induced heartburn that had characterized my entire career as a successful physicist—I began to remember the richness of the feelings I had once felt about physics. I knew there had to be a way to pursue this subject that brought joy, but I needed to rekindle my spirit of exploring the meaning of the universe and abandon the mental compromises dictated by career considerations. I found a lot of help in Thomas Kuhn’s book, which distinguishes between paradigm research and scientific revolutions that lead to paradigm shifts. I’ve already done my share of research within the paradigm; it was time to go to the forefront of physics and think about a paradigm shift.

My personal turning point roughly coincided with the publication of Fridtjof Capra’s book The Tao of Physics. Although my initial reaction to the book was one of suspicion and rejection, it nevertheless affected me deeply. After some time, I was able to understand that the book raises an issue that is not thoroughly explored in it. Capra touches on the parallels between the mystical worldview and the ideas of quantum physics, but does not explore the reasons for these parallels: are they more than a coincidence? I finally discovered where my research into the nature of reality should focus.

Capra approached questions about reality from the perspective of particle physics, but I intuitively felt that the key questions were most directly related to the problem of interpreting quantum physics. This is what I decided to explore. Initially, I did not expect it to be such an interdisciplinary project.

I was teaching a science fiction physics course (I’ve always had a soft spot for science fiction) and one student remarked, “You sound like my psychology professor, Caroline Keutzer!” This resulted in a collaboration with Keutzer, which, although it did not lead to any serious insights, nevertheless introduced me to a large amount of important psychological literature. Eventually, I became aware of the research of Mike Posner and his group in cognitive psychology at the University of Oregon, which was to play a critical role in my work.

In addition to psychology, my subject of research required significant knowledge in neurophysiology – the science of the brain. I met my neurophysiology teacher through the famous dolphinologist John Lily. Lily kindly invited me to participate in a week-long seminar he was teaching at the Esalen Institute; Among the participants was Dr. Frank Burr, MD. While quantum mechanics was my passion, Frank was passionate about brain theory. I could learn from him almost everything I needed to begin working on the mind-brain aspect of this book.

Another important component in the formation of my ideas were the theories of artificial intelligence. I was very lucky here too. One of the popularizers of the theory of artificial intelligence, Douglas Hofstadter, began his career as a physicist; he is a graduate student at the University of Oregon, where I teach. Naturally, when his book came out, I was especially interested in it, and I got some of my key ideas from Doug’s work.

The significant coincidences continued. I became familiar with research in parapsychology through many discussions with another of my colleagues, Ray Hyman, who is by nature a very open-minded skeptic. The last but not least important coincidence was my meeting in the summer of 1984 in Lone Payne, California, with three mystics: Franklin Merrell-Wolf, Richard Moss and Joel Morewood.

Since my father was a Brahmin guru in India, I, in a sense, grew up in an atmosphere of mysticism. However, at school I began my long departure from it through traditional training and practice in a separate field of science. This direction took me away from my childhood sympathies and made me believe that the only reality was the objective reality determined by conventional physics, and everything subjective was due to the complex dance of atoms that we would someday decipher.

In contrast, the mystics at Lone Payne spoke of consciousness as “primordial, self-sufficient and formative of all things.” At first, their ideas caused me considerable cognitive dissonance, but over time I realized that you can still do science, even if you consider consciousness rather than matter to be primary. Moreover, this way of doing science dispels not only the quantum paradoxes of my youth, but also the new paradoxes of psychology, the brain, and artificial intelligence.

So this book represents the end result of my circuitous journey. It took me ten to fifteen years to overcome my addiction to classical physics and then to conduct research and write a book. I hope that the fruit of my efforts deserves your attention. To paraphrase Rabindranath Tagore:

I listened and watched with an open mind,
I poured my soul out into the world,
seeking the unknown in the known,
And I scream out loud in amazement.

Obviously, many people besides those mentioned above contributed to the book, including Gene Varnet, Paul Ray, David Clarke, John David Garcia, Suprokash Mukherzhdi, Jacobo Ginberg, the late Fred Attneave, Ram Dass, Ian Stewart, Henry Stapp , Kim McCathy, Robert Tompkins, Eddie Oshins, Sean Bowles, Fred Wolf, Mark Mitchell and others. The encouragement and support of friends, including Susan Parker Barnett, Kate Wilhelm, Diamon Knight, Andrea Pucci, Dean Kisling, Fleetwood Bernstein, Sherry Anderson, Manoj and Deeptu Pal, Geraldine Moreno-Black and Edd Black, and my late colleague Mike Moravcsik, were essential. and especially our late beloved friend Frederika Leif.

I especially thank Richard Reed, who convinced me to submit the manuscript for publication and passed it on to Jeremy Tarcher. In addition, Richard provided important support, providing helpful criticism and assisting with editing. Of course, my wife Maggie contributed so much to both the development of ideas and the language in which they are expressed that without her this book would literally not be possible. My heartfelt thanks go to J. Tarcher’s editors, Aidin Kelly, Daniel Mulvin, and especially Bob Sheppherd, as well as Jeremy Tarcher himself, for believing in this project.

Thank you all.

PREFACE

Not long ago, we physicists believed that we had finally completed our search: we had reached the end of the road and discovered a mechanical universe, perfect in all its splendor. Things behave the way they do because they were that way in the past, They will be the way they will be because they are that way in the present, and so on. Everything fits perfectly within the narrow framework of Newton’s and Maxwell’s laws. There were mathematical equations that actually corresponded to the behavior of nature. There was a one-to-one correspondence between the symbol on the page of a scientific article and the movement of any objects – from the smallest to the largest – in space and time.

The nineteenth century was ending when the famous A. A. Michelson, speaking about the future of physics, declared that it would consist in “adding decimal places to the results already obtained.” In fairness, it should be noted that Michelson, when making this remark, believed that he was quoting the famous Lord Kelvin. In fact, it was Kelvin who said that essentially everything in the landscape of physics is perfect, except for two dark clouds blocking the horizon.

It turned out that these two dark clouds not only blocked the sun from Turner’s landscape of Newtonian physics, but turned it into a bewildering abstract painting of dots, spots and waves in the spirit of Jackson Pollock. These clouds were the harbingers of the now famous quantum theory of everything.

Now we have reached the end of a century again, this time the twentieth, and clouds are once again gathering to obscure the landscape of even the quantum world of physics. As before, the Newtonian landscape had and still has its fans. It remains suitable for explaining a wide range of mechanical phenomena, from spaceships to automobiles, from satellites to can openers; and yet, when quantum abstract painting eventually revealed that the Newtonian landscape is made up of seemingly random dots, many of us still believe that ultimately there must be some kind of underlying everything – and even quantum dots. that is a kind of objective mechanical order.

You see, science starts from a very fundamental assumption about how things are, or should be. It is this assumption that Amit Goswami, with the assistance of Richard E. Reed and Maggie Goswami, questions in the book you are about to begin reading. For this admission, like its cloudy predecessors in the last century, appears to signal not only the end of a century, but the end of science as we know it. This assumption is that there is an “external”, real, objective reality.

This objective reality is something fundamental: it consists of things that have attributes such as mass, electric charge, angular momentum, spin, position in space and continuous existence in time, expressed as inertia, energy, and even deeper in the microcosm – such properties like strangeness, charm and color. And yet the clouds still gather. For despite everything we know about the objective world, even taking into account all its unexpected twists and turns of space into time and into matter, and black clouds called black holes, even with all the power of our rational minds rushing forward at full speed, we are still left with many secrets, paradoxes and puzzle pieces that simply have nowhere to fit.

But we physicists are a stubborn lot, and we are afraid, as the saying goes, to throw the baby out of the bath with the dirty water. We still lather and shave our faces, being careful how we use Occam’s razor to ensure that we remove all unnecessary “dangerous assumptions.” What are these clouds that shadow the end of the twentieth century abstract art form? They boil down to one phrase: apparently, the universe does not exist without someone who perceives it.

Well, on some level it certainly makes sense. Even the word “universe” was invented by man. So in a sense we can say that what we call the universe depends on the ability of human beings to create the world. But is this observation something deeper than just a matter of semantics? For example, did the universe exist before human beings? It would seem, yes, it existed. Did atoms exist before we discovered the atomic nature of matter? Again, logic dictates that the laws of nature, forces and causes, etc., must surely exist, even though we knew nothing about such things as atoms and subatomic particles.

But it is precisely these assumptions about objective reality that have challenged our modern understanding of physics. Let’s take, for example, a simple particle – an electron. Is it a small piece of matter? The assumption that he is such and consistently behaves as such turns out to be clearly incorrect. After all, at times it appears to be a cloud consisting of an infinite number of possible electrons, which “looks” like a single particle if and only if we observe one of them. Moreover, when it is not a single particle, it appears as a wave-like, oscillating cloud capable of moving at speeds faster than the speed of light – in complete contradiction to Einstein’s concern that nothing material can travel faster than light. But Einstein’s concern is in vain, for when an electron moves in this way, it is not really a particle of matter.

Let’s take another example – the interaction between two electrons.
According to quantum physics, even though these two electrons may be vast distances from each other, the observations being made indicate that there must be some kind of connection between them that allows the message to travel faster than light. However, before these observations, before a conscious observer decided to make them, even the form of the connection was completely uncertain. And, as a third example, a quantum system such as an electron in a bound physical state appears to be in an uncertain state, and yet the uncertainty can be resolved into components of certainty that somehow add up to the original uncertainty. Then comes the observer who, like some giant Alexander cutting the Gordian knot, resolves the uncertainty into a single, definite but unpredictable state simply by observing the electron.

Moreover, the sword strike could occur in the future, determining what state the electron is in now. For now we even have the possibility that observations in the present legitimately determine what we can call the past.

Thus, we have again come to the end of the road. There is too much quantum supernaturalism around, too many experiments showing that the objective world is a world that moves forward in time like a clock, which says that action at a distance, especially instantaneous action at a distance, is impossible, which says that a thing cannot be in two or more places at the same time, represents an illusion of our thinking.

So what should we do? Perhaps this book has the answer. The author puts forward a hypothesis that is so alien to our Western mind that we want to immediately discard it as the delirium of an Eastern mystic. She argues that all of the above paradoxes are explainable and understandable if we abandon the dear assumption of the existence of an “external” objective reality independent of consciousness. She says even more – that the universe is “self-conscious” and that it is consciousness itself that creates the physical world.

By using the word consciousness, Goswami is implying something perhaps deeper than you or I would imply. In his understanding, consciousness is something transcendental, located outside of space-time, non-local and all-pervasive. It is the only reality, but we are able to gain some idea of ​​it only through action, which gives rise to the material and mental aspects of our processes of observation.

But why is it so difficult for us to accept this? Perhaps I am taking on too much by saying that it is difficult for you, the reader, to accept. Perhaps you find this hypothesis self-evident. Well, sometimes I’m quite happy with it, but then I bump into a chair and hurt my leg. That old reality intrudes again, and I “see” myself as different from the chair, cursing its position in space, so arrogantly separate from mine. Goswami addresses this issue brilliantly and gives several often amusing examples to illustrate his claim that the chair and I arise from consciousness.

Goswami’s book is an attempt to bridge the age-old gap between science and spirituality, which he believes is achieved by his hypothesis. He has a lot to say about monistic idealism and how it alone resolves the paradoxes of quantum physics. He then looks at the age-old problem of mind and body, or mind and brain, and shows how his overarching hypothesis that consciousness is everything heals the Cartesian divide, and in particular – in case you were wondering about it – even , how one consciousness appears to be so many separate consciousnesses. Finally, in the last part of the book, he offers a glimmer of hope as we move through the clouds into the twenty-first century, explaining how this hypothesis will, in fact, lead to a return to man’s fascination with his environment, which we certainly need. He explains how he experienced his own theory when he realized the mystical truth: “for true understanding, nothing-but-consciousness must be experienced.”

While reading this book, I began to feel this too. Provided the hypothesis is true, you will also have this experience.
ed., Alain Wolf, Ph.D.,
author of the books “The Dreaming Universe”,
“Making the Quantum Leap”, etc.
La Conner, Washington

The book “The Self-Aware Universe. How consciousness creates the material world.” Amit Goswami

Contents

PREFACE
PART I. The Union of Science and Spirituality
CHAPTER 1. THE CHAPTER AND THE BRIDGE
CHAPTER 2. OLD PHYSICS AND ITS PHILOSOPHICAL HERITAGE
CHAPTER 3. QUANTUM PHYSICS AND THE DEATH OF MATERIAL REALISM
CHAPTER 4. THE PHILOSOPHY OF MONISTIC IDEALISM
PART II. IDEALISM AND THE RESOLUTION OF QUANTUM PARADOXES
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS IN TWO PLACES AT THE SAME TIME AND EFFECTS THAT PRECEDE THEIR CAUSES
CHAPTER 6. THE NINE LIVES OF SCHRODINGER’S CAT
CHAPTER 7. I CHOOSE WITH THEREFORE, I AM
CHAPTER 8. THE EINSTEIN-PODOLSKY-ROSEN PARADOX
CHAPTER 9. RECONCILIATION OF REALISM AND IDEALISM
PART III. SELF-REFERENCE: HOW ONE BECOMES MANY
CHAPTER 10. EXPLORING THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM
CHAPTER 11. IN SEARCH OF THE QUANTUM MIND
CHAPTER 12. PARADOXES AND COMPLEX HIERARCHIES
CHAPTER 13. “I” OF CONSCIOUSNESS
CHAPTER 14. UNIFICATION OF PSYCHOLOGIES
PART IV . RETURN OF CHARM
CHAPTER 15. WAR AND PEACE
CHAPTER 16. EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL CREATIVITY
CHAPTER 17. THE AWAKENING OF BUDDHA
CHAPTER 18. IDEALISMAL THEORY OF ETHICS
CHAPTER 19. SPIRITUAL JOY
GLOBAR OF TERMS