UberScience: Consciousness as the Key to Understanding the Universe
“Everyone sees the limits of his own vision as the limits of the world.” — Arthur Schopenhauer. 1788–1860.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” — William Blake. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” — Muriel Rukeyser. The Speed of Darkness.
Everything we know about astronomy, from the orbits of planets to the atmospheric gases of Venus and the mineral deposits on the moons of Alpha Centauri, is rooted in our understanding of the properties of light. For example, we determine what stars are made of by analyzing their light spectrum through a process called spectroscopy, where the unique patterns of absorption lines in the spectrum reveal the specific elements present in the star’s atmosphere. And, of course, we know the distance of a certain star by the amount of time it takes its light to reach us.
Yet, our understanding of the universe comes to a screeching halt when we encounter dark matter and dark energy. We might as well call these x and y for all we know about them. According to Wikipedia, “Dark matter is implied by gravitational effects which cannot be explained by general relativity unless more matter is present than can be observed.” And dark energy is “whatever is causing the universe to expand faster over time.” In other words, we know they’re there because they’re needed to explain what we’re seeing and make our formulas work but we have no idea what they are because they don’t interact with light.
You may be tempted to label these as small rounding errors but that would be a grievous error because, together, dark matter and dark energy comprise over 95% of the total mass-energy content of the universe.
Wait, what?!? All those hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, add up to only 5% of what’s out there? Yup, you read that right! The remaining 95% is a profound mystery.
The universe was not designed, if it was ever designed, with our five senses in mind. Things happened the other way around. It came first and our five senses evolved to interact with it, slowly, painstakingly, over eons, learning to process a little bit more of the information inherent in everything around us. Therefore, we have no reason to believe that our senses provide us with a complete understanding of the universe. Just as a bat uses echolocation and a butterfly sees ultraviolet light, there’s far more information around us than our senses can detect.
Our understanding is similarly constrained by the space-time continuum, a construct of our minds that may not reflect the true nature of the universe. To insist that reality is limited to four dimensions, three of space and one of time, is as anthropocentric as the ancient belief that the sun revolved around the Earth. Yet, this is how most of us go about spending our days. Modern physics posits the existence of additional dimensions and our inability to perceive or measure them doesn’t make them any less real.
Haven’t we been here before? Wasn’t it just a few hundred years ago that we realized the universe wasn’t created with us at its center and doesn’t revolve around us? Yet we still cling to the belief that what we see and feel is all there is. Science is partly complicit in this deceit, dazzling us with ever more incredible discoveries in the physical realm but glossing over the fact that there might be more to the universe than we can experience with our senses and measure with our tools today.
Every scientist should be reminded on a daily basis that we know nothing about what constitutes 95% of the universe around us. Instead of just handing out PhD’s in ever more esoteric fields and focusing on advances in what we already mostly understand, we should be hard at work tackling the hard problems that have confounded us for so long in areas outside classical science and which would open new vistas in the unknown dimensions of the universe around us.
I liken our current scientific approach to that of a caveman staring at the walls of his cozy cave, lit by a burning fire, carefully studying every minute detail of the few cubic feet of space around him, totally oblivious to the vast ocean of data right behind his back and beyond the reach of light.
What if the universe is not exactly as we envision it? What if it’s nothing like we’ve come to believe? We already know that there are dimensions beyond our comprehension, senses beyond our grasp, matter and energy that we can’t interact with, all of which would help explain the universe in a much more holistic manner. Wouldn’t it behoove us to apply every effort to brave those shores?
“If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist!” is a common refrain of scientists (including my former self) dismissive of a wide range of pseudoscientific phenomena such as Extra Sensory Perception, Clairvoyance, Parapsychology, Astrology, Hypnotherapy, Ufology, Psychokinesis, Precognition, and the like. Yet each of these phenomena have been around for ages. Perhaps there’s something there if we just open our aperture a bit.
While skepticism, the core tenet of the scientific method, is indispensable to the proper advancement of knowledge, it’s also crucial to remember that we didn’t know about x-rays, subatomic particles, or ultraviolet light just a few decades ago and yet all those things exist and have existed long before science ever “discovered” them. We just didn’t have the tools, and sometimes the imagination, to identify and quantify them.
In fact, any and all huge leaps in science have come not through small incremental improvements in the existing knowledge base but rather when an intrepid soul has figured out that we’ve been looking at things the wrong way. We were so convinced that the sun rotated around the globe that we burned people at the stake for saying otherwise! It was only when someone took the time to look at the problem with new eyes that we realized how wrong we’d been all along. There are so many layers to the universe that we haven’t even touched yet and, the longer we insist on our current scientific dogma, the longer we’ll be lost down a proverbial blind alley.
Perhaps a better, more productive, refrain would be: “If you can’t measure it, try, try again!” This is not to say that we should accept any article of pseudoscience on faith but rather that we should remove the stigma attached to such topics and examine them with fresh eyes and with the best tools at our disposal.
Let’s take, as a hopefully somewhat uncontroversial case study, the phenomenon of Near-Death Experiences (NDE). People have been experiencing NDEs since ancient times, the first recorded mention probably being the myth of Er in Plato’s Republic (circa 375 BCE). Doctors have been documenting thousands of cases for hundreds of years and many books have been written on the topic. According to a 2011 study, an estimated nine million people in the US have reported experiencing an NDE.
Yet, most scientists dismiss NDEs as a mere trick of the mind, caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain. Neuroscientists hypothesize that an NDE results from “disturbed bodily multisensory integration” that occurs during life-threatening events. But, upon closer examination, these theories seem incapable of explaining what people actually experience.
One of the most common types of NDE is that experienced by patients who suffer from a cardiac arrest during an operation and find themselves hovering near the ceiling, looking down at the operating table, and later able to recall every word spoken by the surgeons and every gesture made by the nurses. There are also many documented cases of individuals somehow seeing relatives in the waiting room and describing their conversations in detail, all while being “dead” as far as medical science is concerned.
Where is all this mental processing happening if neurons are no longer firing in the brain? Why does it seem to be “even more real than reality”? We’d have to open the door to all kinds of alternative and esoteric ideas if we don’t accept current scientific orthodoxy. It has been suggested, for example, that our brains are not really doing the thinking for us but rather acting as filters that reduce access to external phenomena so we’re not overwhelmed by stimuli. Paradoxically, partially or completely shutting down our neural networks seems to lead to better comprehension of the world around us, perhaps even unleashing our “sixth sense”, allowing us to see through walls.
But how would you go about testing such a hypothesis? It would clearly be immoral to induce NDEs for such a purpose but an alternative might be to perform fMRI studies of the human brain under the influence of psychedelics, an experience which seems to mimic NDEs, amplifying perception and offering insights into the mind’s potential.
The brains of those on psychedelics, as well those in deep meditation, shut down the Default Mode Network (DMN), the part of our brain associated with background chatter, and by doing so gets us one step closer to our true self, our soul if you will. If we then see visions of angels and spirit animals and deceased family members, as we do in Near-Death Experiences, are they being manifested by our mind or are they real? If the former, how is it that our “mind” is doing so with our brain turned off? Where and how did that computation take place?
If we assume the possibility of consciousness existing outside the brain, if we accept those visions as real, “more real than reality”, then those things must exist in some dimensions of the universe that we don’t normally have access to, ones that become accessible to our mind at the time of death, as oxygen deprivation similarly shuts down the Default Mode Network in our human brain.
This is a far cry from the scientific view which says all human cognition happens as a byproduct of the brain but, then again, current scientific dogma has no answer for the simple question: if the neurons aren’t firing, where is the cognition happening?
Could studying altered states of consciousness — ethically and rigorously — help us unlock these mysteries? I think it’s the most promising path in front of us.
The exploration of the unknown requires a bold, methodical approach, a reframing of what we now call pseudoscience. While most pseudoscientific claims may be false, they often point to aspects of reality that remain unexplored. Removing the stigma surrounding these topics and applying scientific rigor could open the “doors of perception” and lead to groundbreaking discoveries. I call this UberScience.
History teaches us that transformative advances occur not through incremental progress but by challenging dogmas. The realization that Earth revolves around the sun was once heretical. What if our current understanding of the universe is equally flawed?
The universe’s greatest mysteries might not lie in distant galaxies but within ourselves. Our collective consciousness, long dismissed by traditional science, could hold the key to understanding phenomena like dark matter, dark energy, and dimensions beyond our comprehension.
The way to the future is not just ahead of us, it is within us and through us. Long have we stared at the horizon and deduced our essence. It’s only by turning our gaze inward that we will discover the rest of the universe, the one inside every one of us. For every spec of information visible to our eyes and audible to our ears, our main instruments of scientific inquiry so far, there is a mountain of data at our disposal right here, in our own minds, buried deep not just in each of our psyches but also, critically, in our collective consciousness. It is now finally time to “boldly go where no man has gone before.”
Author’s note: I’ve deleted all my social media accounts (except for Medium) and now depend exclusively on the kindness of strangers to pass the word around about my blog posts. Please share this post with others if you liked it. Thank you.
