Authors: Rudolph E. Tanzi
Why should you and I care personally about this? Once each of us makes peace with reality instead of illusion, so many more possibilities exist—infinite possibilities, in fact. There is no need to be mournful. The mind has always amazed itself. Now it has a chance to fulfill itself.
Qualia
Human beings are incredibly fortunate that our brains can adapt to anything we envision. In the terminology of neuroscience, all the
colors, sounds, and textures that we experience are lumped together under the term
qualia
, which is Latin for “qualities.” Colors are qualia, and so are smells. The feeling of love is qualia; for that matter, so is the feeling of just being alive. We are like trembling antennas turning billions of bits of raw data into the bustling, noisy, colorful world—a world composed of qualities. So every experience is a qualia experience. The word is so bland that you’d never suspect qualia could become a baffling mystery, but it has.
It’s inescapable, according to quantum physics, that physical objects possess no fixed attributes. Rocks aren’t hard; water isn’t wet; light isn’t bright. These are all qualia created in your consciousness, using the brain as a processing facility. The fact that a physicist drives a car to work instead of a cloud of energy doesn’t mean the invisible cloud of energy can be dismissed. It occupies the quantum level, where time is born, and space, and everything that fills space. You cannot experience time unless your brain interfaces the quantum world. You cannot experience space, either, or anything that exists in space.
Your brain is a quantum device, and somewhere below the level of the five senses, you are a creative force. Time is your responsibility. Space needs you. It doesn’t need you to exist; it needs you to exist
in your reality
. If that sounds confusing, here’s a telling example. A sixth sense exists that most people overlook, the sense of where your body is, including its shape and the position of your arms and legs. This sense is called proprioception. Knowing where your body is involves receptors in your muscles as well as sensory neurons in the inner ear, joined to your sense of balance, which is centered in the cerebellum. It’s a complex circuitry, and when it breaks down, people have the eerie feeling of being disembodied. They do not know, for example, if they are holding their right arm up in the air, straight out, or down by their sides. Such cases are very rare, and fascinating. One way for someone who lacks proprioception to feel that they have a body is to ride in a convertible with the top down.
The wind rushing around them, as detected by working receptors in the skin, substitutes for the lost sixth sense.
In other words, the sensation of being wrapped by the wind gives these people a place in space. Since that sensation occurs in the brain, space needs the brain in order to exist. If a neutrino had a nervous system, it wouldn’t recognize our sense of space, because a neutrino is a subatomic particle that can travel through the Earth without slowing down—to it, Earth is empty space. By the same logic, time also needs the brain, as is easily shown when you go to sleep and time stops. It doesn’t stop in the sense that all clocks wait for you to wake up in the morning. Time stops
for you
.
Once you take away all the qualities that the brain is processing, the world “out there” has no physical properties remaining. As the eminent German physicist Werner Heisenberg stated, “The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.” What’s left when atoms and molecules vanish is the creator of those “potentialities or possibilities.” Who is the elusive, invisible creator? Consciousness.
Finding out that you are a creator is an exciting prospect. We need to know more. A specialist in perception, cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman at the University of California at Irvine, coined a useful term: “conscious agent.” A conscious agent perceives reality through a specific type of nervous system. It doesn’t have to be a human nervous system. Other species are conscious agents too. Their brains interface with time and space, although not the way ours does. A tree sloth in South America might move a few yards in a day, a pace we—but not it—would consider excruciatingly slow. Time feels normal to a sloth, just as it does to a hummingbird that is beating its wings eighty times per second.
Here we are challenging one of the core beliefs that keeps the reality illusion going strong, the belief that the objective world is the same for every living thing. Using somewhat technical language,
Hoffman mounts a startling attack on this belief: “Perceptual experiences do not match or approximate the properties of the objective world but instead provide a species-specific user interface to that world.” If you’ve stayed with the logic so far, this sentence will be clear to you, except for the phrase “user interface,” which is adopted from computers.
Imagine the universe as an experience rather than a thing. You can experience what looks like a vast part of the cosmos by staring at the banquet of stars spread out on a clear summer night, but those stars aren’t even a billion-billionth of the whole. The universe cannot be grasped without an infinite nervous system. Because of its quadrillion synapses, the human brain gives infinity a run for its money. Still, you would never be able to see, hear, or touch anything if you had to be in touch with your synapses—simply opening your eyes requires thousands of synched signals. So Nature devised a shortcut, which looks a good deal like the shortcuts you use every day on your computer. With a computer, if you want to delete a sentence, you simply push the delete key. You don’t have to go into the machine’s innards or fiddle with its programming. You don’t have to rearrange thousands of zeroes and ones in digital code. One touch suffices—that’s how a user interface works. In the same way, when you create qualia, like the sweetness of sugar or the brilliance of an emerald, you don’t have to go inside your brain or fiddle with its programming. You open your eyes, you see light—and bingo, the whole world is suddenly there.
Arguing in this way, Hoffman has made himself a brave target. Arrayed against him is the entire camp of scientists who declare that the brain creates consciousness. Hoffman turns it around and says that consciousness creates the brain. Neither camp has an easy job proving its case. The “brain first” camp must show how atoms and molecules learned to think. The “consciousness first” camp must show how mind creates atoms and molecules. The cleverness in Hoffman’s position—and we thank him heartily for his careful
reasoning—is that he doesn’t have to commit himself to explaining ultimate reality, a problem that defies reason. Is God the ultimate reality? Did your universe spring from an infinite number of multiverses? Did Plato hit upon the right idea thousands of years ago when he said that material existence is based on invisible forms?
Too many theories clash, but if you stick with the user interface—Nature’s shortcut—locating ultimate reality doesn’t matter. Physicists can drive cars to work and still know that cars are actually invisible energy clouds. What matters is that a nervous system creates a picture to live by. Just as time and space need to be real only
for you
, so does everything else. Religionists and atheists can sit down to tea together without fighting. The argument over ultimate reality will be unsettled for a long, long time. Meanwhile each of us will continue to create our personal reality—and hopefully get better at it.
Chasing the Light
If you can accept that you are a conscious agent, we’re with you. But there is a nagging question left to settle. What is a conscious agent actually doing? In the Book of Genesis, God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. You are joining in that creative act this very minute, only you don’t need words. (Neither did God, probably.) Somewhere in silence the most basic building block in creation, light, comes into reality the instant you open your eyes. If you are making light real for you, how do you do it?
Let’s backtrack 13.8 billion years. At the instant of the Big Bang, the cosmos erupted from a void. Physics accepts that every particle in the universe is winking in and out of the void at a rapid rate, thousands of times per second. There are various terms for the void: the vacuum state, the pre-created state of the universe, the field of probability waves. The essential concept is the same, however. Far more real than the physical universe is the field of infinite potential from which it springs, here and now. Genesis never stopped at the level of the quantum field—all events past, present, and future are
embedded there. So are all the things we can imagine or conceive of. That’s why it would take an infinite nervous system to actually perceive “real” reality.
Instead, we make brain pictures that we call reality, even though these pictures are very limited. The only world that exists for human beings mirrors the evolution of the human nervous system. Brain pictures evolve. The way a physicist looks at fire isn’t the same as the way Cro-Magnon man looked at fire—and probably worshiped it. Suddenly we see why the lower brain wasn’t dropped or bypassed as the brain went on to higher things. All previous versions of a nervous system—going back to the most primitive sensory responses of one-celled organisms swimming toward the sunlight in a pond—are wrapped up and incorporated into the brain you have today. Thanks to your neocortex, you can enjoy Bach, which would be scrambled noise to a chimpanzee—but if an insane listener shoots the harpsichordist, you will react with all the primitive power of fight or flight in the reptilian brain.
The human brain didn’t evolve on its own; it was following a picture of the world that existed in consciousness. The user interface kept improving to keep up with what the user wanted to do. At this moment, you own the latest version of the interface because you are participating in the latest “world picture” that humans have evolved to.
Whew.
According to Hoffman’s theory, which he calls conscious realism, “the objective world consists of conscious agents and their perceptual experience.” Goodbye to everything “out there”; hello to everything “in here.” In fact, the two are merged at their source. Consciousness has no trouble weaving together both halves of reality. Now we come to the moment when you have to fasten your seat belt. There is actually no world “in here” or “out there.” There is only the experience of qualia. Atoms and molecules aren’t things; they are mathematical descriptions of experience. Space and time are also only descriptions of experience. Your brain isn’t responsible
for any of it, because your brain too is just an experience that your mind is having.
This is a huge leap, but it gives us untold power. Literally untold, for our parents and the society around us didn’t tell us who we really are. We are the source of qualia. We are the caretakers of consciousness who do not need to bend before the forces of Nature. In our hands we hold the key to make Nature bend to us. Despite our limited minds, we are commanding “Let there be light” just as God does in his infinite mind. And yet this knowledge doesn’t actually unlock the power. If you stand on a railroad track before an oncoming train, muttering “I created this reality,” your mind won’t prevent the enormous mass of a diesel engine from colliding with the small mass of your body, leading to unfortunate, messy results.
The ancient sages of India were not deterred by diesel trains (if they had existed back then), declaring that the world is only a dream. If a train hit you in a dream, you might feel all the sensations of being hit in real life, but you can wake up from a dream. There’s the difference. Waking up from a dream seems easy and natural to us. Waking up from physical reality seems all but impossible, and while we remain in this representational world that we call physical reality, its rules of behavior follow Newton’s Laws of Motion. Is that final?
One time a sorcerer took the hand of his apprentice and told him to hold on tight. “See that tree over there?” the sorcerer said, and suddenly he jumped over the top of the tree, taking the apprentice with him. When they landed on the ground, the apprentice went into severe distress. He felt dizzy and confused; his stomach turned over, and he started to retch. The sorcerer looked on calmly. This was just the mind’s reaction to being shown its self-delusion. The mind cannot believe that it is possible to leap over a tree in real life as easily as in a dream.
We know that dreams all happen in our heads; we overlook that the waking state is also happening in our heads. But once the mind is shown its mistake, a new reality dawns. You may recognize
this incident from the writings of Carlos Castaneda and his famous teacher, the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan. Of course, any sensible person knows that those books are fiction.
Yet waking up from the dream is the key to enlightenment, as we saw in the last chapter. It is the basis of Vedanta, the oldest spiritual tradition in India, which spread its influence throughout Asia. A key concept in Vedanta is
Pragya paradha
, translated as “the mistake of the intellect” or some variant. The mistake comes down to forgetting who you are. Seeing ourselves as separate, isolated beings, we surrender to the look of the world, accepting that mindless natural forces control us. We are not taking a stand about jumping over trees or standing on railroad tracks. The waking state has its rules and limitations. The whole qualia argument attempts to return to the natural, basic act of perception, showing that reality isn’t a given. We perceive what our nervous system has evolved to perceive.
To turn theory into practice, let’s take this new viewpoint and see how it might change your life.
POWERING UP THE INTERFACE
There is no knowable reality without consciousness. You can create any quality (qualia) you want.
Everyone is creating qualia already. The secret is to become better at it.
To become better, you must get closer to the creative source.