Does Consciousness Create Reality?
Does your mind have the potential to affect reality itself? It may sound like something out of a science fiction novel, but there is new research emerging on consciousness that shows there could be more to your mind than you ever thought possible. And I'm going to show you some exciting things that have been happening.
During 2012, researchers at Imperial College began to explore what takes place in your mind when you're actually tripping on psilocybin, the compound in magic mushrooms. Because of how the molecule changes experience, they knew to expect fireworks. Instead, the brain scans told a different tale: activity plummeted. Blood flow and oxygen consumption tanked, with the biggest drops occurring in the brain's major communication centers.
That's the funny thing: the more the brain's anterior cingulate quieted down, the more intense the experience volunteers reported. If the brain creates consciousness, shouldn't that be inverted?
The Brain as a Valve
Now, what about an earlier theory about the brain that these results seem to bolster? William James and Henri Bergson predicted that rather than "creating" consciousness, the brain might actually be doing the opposite: filtering it. Imagine your brain as a valve instead of a lightbulb, pinching down a big stream of consciousness to what's required to stay alive, to find food or stay away from whatever's dangerous.
That has just been a metaphor for well over a century, since we haven't been able to test it until the development of today's imaging. Now we can actually start investigating which way the connection between brain activity and consciousness goes.
Another strange phenomenon worth considering is the paradoxical moment of lucidity that can hit a patient with advanced dementia in the moments before their death. Even in the face of severe tissue degradation, patients have been known to reunite with their loved ones, speak with them and use language that they haven't in years. These have long been treated as anecdotal, but more researchers are confirming they really happen.
Neither finding independently proves anything, but they become more palatable if we look at the brain as a limiting factor of consciousness rather than its origin.
Physics and the Nature of Reality
Why not stop for a moment and ask: what is an electron, really? Because every time you ask that question, physics will tell you about its mass, its charge, its spin, and the way it interacts with everything around it. Every answer describes a relationship. None of them tells you what the thing doing the relating actually is.
It's not a new realization. Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington made the same point in the 1920s, and it still holds: physics is good at describing how the universe is structured but fails to say what it is. All of the equations describe patterns of relations, without saying what they are relations of.
We usually guess that the answer is "matter" and go on. But in physics, matter is precisely this set of relations, nothing more. That leaves us in a strange position: the one thing that we have direct contact with, without the need of a theory, is our experience.
The Quantum Gap
Quantum theory has an odd open secret. The mathematics allows us to describe a system moving through many different potentialities, but what we finally observe is one particular outcome. The change from possibility into plain fact remains unexplained.
John von Neumann figured this out in 1932. You can put the cut, the point where possibility becomes reality, wherever you like between particle and detector, or between detector and reader. The predictions stay the same no matter where the cut goes. The theory demands a cut but offers no guidance on where to put it.
Decoherence is the popular explanation for why we never catch a coffee cup in two places at once. Objects large enough to make a difference are always interacting with the environment, which destroys any chance of interference. But it doesn't explain why we observe one specific result instead of another. The problem remains, and scientists admit as much.
Eugene Wigner, who received the Nobel Prize for his work on symmetry in physics, argued in 1961 that quantum mechanics could not be formulated in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness of an observer. Wigner's later withdrawal was based on philosophic objections rather than empirical evidence.
Experiments That Challenge Reality
These ideas had been nothing more than theories for most of the past century. Then the paradigm shifted.
Bell's theorem is a test for whether the universe can be both local and consist of objects with definite properties prior to measurement. It turns out you can't have both, and experiments have been showing this for 50 years. The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for this proof to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger.
The universe is not a montage of separate objects with pre-existing properties. And this isn't some fringe reading, it's a Nobel citation.
Now, the old Wigner puzzle. Suppose your friend in the lab makes a measurement and gets a result. Wigner outside treats the lab as a whole quantum-mechanically, and in that way unresolved. Are both viewpoints right?
In 2019, scientists built a six-photon experiment and shattered the inequality by five standard deviations. The take home? As long as you cling to the notions of locality and free choice, quantum theory has to be viewed as observer-dependent.
In 2020, a theorem in Nature Physics confirmed this even further. If quantum mechanics holds true all the way up to the observer, then one of these has to be abandoned: no-superdeterminism, locality, or the absoluteness of observed events, meaning an event being a fact for everyone rather than just for the observer.
The strength of these limits defeats Bell's, defying what many didn't know they were assuming.
Here's a caveat for you: the photon's path stood for an observer, not a person. Whether that makes a difference when it comes to creatures with points of view, we're still not sure. But think about the question that is now on the table. Whether facts are absolute is on its way to being tested in laboratories.
The Measurable Mind
But why should any of this matter outside of philosophical consideration? Because some of these concepts are creeping toward the realm of measurement.
Integrated information theory defines consciousness as integrated information, an amount a system has or doesn't have. No matter your opinion of it, the index that the theory generates is in use clinically. Stimulating the cortex and measuring the complexity of the response gives a number that differentiates wakefulness from sleep and anesthesia, and even detects awareness in nonverbal patients. Consciousness is being quantified by bedside clinicians who require numbers, not philosophy.
The classic criticism of quantum explanations for the mind has always been that brains are just too warm and wet to support delicate states. Biology is, however, steadily undermining this. In 2007, a paper in Nature showed long-lived quantum coherence in photosynthesis at physiological temperatures, inside a leaf.
Whatever the Penrose-Hameroff theory's ultimate value, it has got an interesting new thread. A recent review showed that evidence linking microtubules with targets for anesthesia appears to support the predictions of the theory. Anesthesia reliably inactivates consciousness, and its exact binding target is highly informative.
What's Next?
None of this is definitive proof, and perhaps we should be talking about the gaps rather than covering them up.
Even if you buy every bit of the above, there's still no scientific connection between "the physical world isn't the lowest layer" and "your mind influences matter." They are two separate claims, worlds apart, and most popular writing conflates them. Observer-dependence in a six-photon experiment is not the law of attraction.
Even so, they still all lead to the same eventual destination.
Physics deals in structure but never in substance. Its ultimate theory cannot generate a definite world without a perspective, and it never has. Experiments are straining at the concept of a fact "out there." And silencing certain brain areas creates an enhancement of experience rather than its diminishment, in proportion.
Four lines converging on the same direction. None finished, and none derived from another.
Contemplative practices have always insisted that the awareness bit happened first, that it's closer than you think, and that the demarcation line between observer and observed is more transparent than we are led to believe. They figured that out through first-person inquiry, not math. Physics cannot confirm their claims, but the alternative becomes less tenable.
It's about the right time for a philosophical question to come ready for experimentation.
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