The Limits Of Science Concerning The Reality Of Consciousness

Limits-of-Science-main-4-postby Science And Non-Duality (SAND)

Quarks in an atom; molecules in a liquid; proteins in a cell; cells in an organism; neurons in a brain; people in a city; grains of sand in a dune; snowflakes in an avalanche; stars in a galaxy: when the many parts of a system interact, behaviors appear in the whole system that weren’t present in the parts themselves. These surprising “emergent” behaviors are what our universe appears to be made of, from the Big Bang, to the unfathomable complexity of Life, to the unimaginable future yet to come.

Biology isn’t applied chemistry. Psychology isn’t applied biology. Every scale, every level of abstraction brings its own universe of phenomena, complexity, questions, hypotheses, exploration and experimentation. The whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, it is fundamentally different. Analysis and reductionism can only provide limited insights, but never capture the essence of the indescribable. ~ SAND

The Reality of Consciousness, Peter Russell

Wave-particle duality, the uncertainty principle, the collapse of the wave function, and entanglement all point to awareness being an intrinsic aspect of reality. Yet we are still trying to understand them in terms of a world view that believes the real world to be that of space, time, and matter, and relegates consciousness to some artifact of brain processes.

Yet the one thing of which we are certain is that we are aware. And it is the one thing the current worldview cannot account for. is profound anomaly will ultimately lead to the full paradigm shift to which contemporary physics is, unwittingly, pointing.

With consciousness as primary, everything remains the same and everything changes. Mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry are unchanged. What changes is our assumption as to what they are describing. They are not describing the unfolding of a physical world, but the unfolding of a universal self-aware field. We are led to the conclusion that the entire cosmos is a vast field of knowing, knowing itself, and in that knowing creating for itself the appearance of a material world. Why then don’t we see it that way?

Consciousness and Modern Physics: The Limits of Science, Steve Pollaine

Consciousness is either an emergent property based on the brain, a fundamental feature of the universe related to quantum mechanics and entanglement, or is something more fundamental than the physical world. What does the evidence show? If we examine children who remember previous lives and provide details that have been corroborated, accounts of near death experiences, mediums who speak with spirits, the experience of ghost hunters, shamanic practitioners, and the perceptions of enlightened masters, then the simplest conclusion is that our consciousness survives physical death, and existed before birth. If true, this means that our consciousness is not dependent upon a physical brain, and in fact is not dependent at all on the physical world. This implies that consciousness is more fundamental than any physical manifestation, and thus can’t be described in terms of quantum mechanical wave functions, the zero point field, entangled particles, or any other entity subject to the equations of physics.

If true, then there must exist a reality that lies beyond the physical world that our awareness goes to after physical death. In fact, this reality, and consciousness itself, has been explored for thousands of years with subjective techniques such as meditation, inquiry, shamanic journeying, and the use of entheogens such as peyote, mushrooms or ayahuasca. The fundamental question then changes from “how does the brain generate consciousness” to “how does our body and brain interface with consciousness.”

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