About a week ago I wrote “Is consciousness more fundamental to reality than quantum physics?” The title of that blog post came from the title of an article in New Scientist that focused on the central messages of two books, The Blind Spot by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson, and Physics Fixes All the Facts by Liam Graham.
I’ve started reading each book. So far, I’m not finding a direct contradiction between them.
The Blind Spot argues that science has gone awry by failing to recognize that everything we humans know and experience, naturally including scientific activities, rests upon the foundation of direct bodily experience. Which makes perfect sense. How could a scientist learn the result of an experiment without being consciously aware? Thus the so-called objective God’s Eye View is impossible, since subjectivity is always involved in every aspect of human experience.
Physics Fixes All the Facts aims to convince the reader that goings-on at the atomic and subatomic level are responsible for everything in existence, even seemingly higher level phenomena like consciousness. Early on in his book, Graham cites numerous other examples of emergent phenomena that follow the adage, more is different. For example, separately hydrogen and oxygen are gases. Combined as H2O, water appears — a very different thing than hydrogen and oxygen.
Graham doesn’t deny emergent phenomena. He simply believes that they are illusions, given that, in his opinion, they can be reduced to quantum theory, which governs particles and forces. I’m confident that he views consciousness as being produced by the brain, which is comprised of physical entities governed by quantum physics. That’s my view also, along with virtually all neuroscientists.
If you don’t believe this, consider Graham’s argument that a system can either have Physics properties or Higher properties. Perhaps you believe that the brain is governed by Physics properties but consciousness is a Higher property. How then, does consciousness produce effects in the world, such as by a conscious human thinking, “I’m going to pour myself a cup of coffee.”
If consciousness emerges from the brain, then the most direct explanation is that Physics properties cause that thought, even though it may appear to be immaterial. The other possibility is that some Higher property separate from Physics produces the cup of coffee thought. If so, how? What is the mechanism? What non-Physics explanation is there for a conscious intention?
It’s certainly possible to come up with hypotheses, such as an immaterial soul. But what’s needed isn’t airy-fairy metaphysics, but a concrete causal connection between a Higher property and a physical action. I’ve never encountered any explanation of how this could occur.
Graham says:
To be an illusion is to be unreal. Hence to understand what is illusion, we need to understand what is real. There are many philosophical definitions of reality. One, known as the Eleatic Doctrine, defines reality as having causal power. Here is the original passage; [from Plato]
“…a thing genuinely is if it has some capacity, of whatever sort, either to act on another thing, of whatever nature, or to be acted on, even to the slightest degree and by the most trivial of things, and even if it is just the once. That is, what marks off the things that are as being.”
If all causation happens at the lowest level, this then implies that everything else is unreal. I will argue that in this sense, emergence is an illusion.
Causal power strikes me as being a pretty good criterion for something being real. After all, if something has no effect on anything else, and is unaffected by anything else, how could we ever know that it exists? More accurately, would it exist at all if it made no difference to anything else? This is why I find “God,” “soul,” “spirit,” and such to be empty supernatural notions.
Not completely empty, because those words have effects on the human brain, as do all other words. But there’s no evidence of any entities corresponding to God, soul, and spirit having independent demonstrable effects in the world. I asked Claude, the AI model, “What are the strengths and weaknesses of the Eleatic Doctrine about real things having causal power?”
Here’s Claude’s interesting, albeit philosophically dense, response:
The Eleatic Principle, as Plato has the Eleatic Stranger propose it in the Sophist (247d-e), is really a diagnostic move in a specific debate: the Stranger is trying to broker peace between the “Giants” (materialists who say only bodies are real) and the “Gods” (Friends of the Forms, who say only unchanging intelligible being is real). His proposed mark of real being: anything that possesses even the smallest capacity to act on something else or be acted upon, however briefly, counts as real. This lets bodies in (obviously causally active) but also lets in souls, knowledge, and even the Forms themselves — the last via the somewhat strained move that being known is itself a kind of being acted upon.
Strengths
Ontological economy. It gives a working test for what to include in your inventory of the world: if positing something does no causal work, there’s no principled reason to posit it. This is basically Ockham’s razor with teeth, and it’s the ancestor of a very live modern move — Alexander’s dictum (“to be real is to have causal powers”) — used against free-floating epiphenomena in metaphysics and philosophy of mind.
A genuine third way. Rather than just picking a side between “only matter is real” and “only unchanging Forms are real,” it reframes the question around function rather than substance-type. That’s a clever dialectical move, and it anticipates functionalism: something counts as real by what it does, not what it’s made of.
Grounds a workable epistemology. We find out about things through their effects on us or on our instruments — this is basically the causal theory of perception and, later, the causal theory of reference (Kripke, Putnam) and scientific realism arguments for unobservables (we believe in electrons because of their detectable effects, not direct acquaintance).
Anticipates dispositional/causal theories of properties. Shoemaker’s view that properties just are their causal profiles, and much of contemporary powers-based metaphysics (Mumford, Molnar), is a lineal descendant of this passage.
Weaknesses
It threatens to exclude the very things Plato wants to save. Numbers, universals, propositions, and (on a strict reading) the Forms themselves look causally inert. The Stranger has to stretch “being acted upon” to include “being an object of thought” just to keep the Forms in — but that stretch does a lot of unacknowledged work. If merely being thought about counts as being causally affected, the criterion risks becoming vacuous, since anything conceivable can be “affected” that way.
Vagueness about what counts as causal contact. The principle needs a non-circular account of “power to act or be acted upon,” and it’s never given one. Without that, you can’t actually adjudicate hard cases (abstracta, laws of nature, dispositions themselves).
Regress/circularity worry. Causal powers are usually powers of something that already exists. Making causal power the criterion of existence risks putting the cart before the horse — you need entities to ground powers, but you’re using powers to identify entities.
It can boomerang against the intentions behind it. In modern dress, this principle fuels Kim’s causal exclusion argument: if physical causation is causally closed, then mental properties, meanings, or values threaten to become epiphenomenal and thus (by the Eleatic criterion) unreal — exactly the outcome the original move was designed to avoid when it included souls and knowledge as real.
Static entities are awkward by design. The whole point of Parmenidean/Eleatic ontology (the tradition this doctrine gets its name from, ironically) was that true being is changeless. A criterion built on causal activity sits uneasily with that heritage — which is part of why the passage in the Sophist is read as Plato quietly revising, not just applying, the Eleatic legacy.
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If God is unchanging in his home, then does he exist? He speaks, and his word is the active principle behind all existence and life. It is the principle that drives motion, creation, even destruction, and most importantly, Relative existence.
If something exists because of its effect on something else, that is a relativeistic relationship, not an absolute one. And yet, the principles of science are indeed absolute. Gravity as a principle, functions wherever there is matter and space. We have the principle, and we have its execution in measurable physical reality. Though the principle is beyond physical reality and resides only in the regions of thought. And what drives the regions of thought? Something beyond thought. That might be the Spirit, or God.
As Ron E. So eloquently pointed out, when physics so heavily relies upon the big bang theory, but comes up empty in attempting to calculate the center of that big bang, because there is no measurable center — all things are expanding apart from each other (with the exception of the effect of gravity), then the big bang itself relies upon something from an alternate or additional dimension from this physical reality.
There is the principle, and the execution, and no detectable connection between the two.
Just like consciousness and thought. One is the execution, fleeting, unreliable, stunning and aweful, fearsome and forgettable; and the other, consciousness, the immutable principle whose very existence makes all thought possible, and maybe even all existence, yet, like all principles in science, entirely beyond and not at all connected to any measurable physical thing, except as the cause, never the result.
Its essential to understand how mind works. But this becomes worthless as understanding itself is application of mind.
Due to this it becomes impossible to exit illusion.
At its core mind is constantly doing simran
who-you-who-you-who-you-…..
Those who can reach that layer is at edge of mind and many siddhis will be his/her.
When Mind and Self come to be,
Mind wondered who
Then so came self into existence
doing the simran of who-you-who-you—
will benefit more than falsehood you are
Personal Expereince
Quite probably, Liam Graham with his ‘Physics Fixes All the Facts’, for all I know, is probably describing reality as it is, but such is not my experience – and perhaps as Graham says, ‘emergent phenomena “… are illusions, given that, in his opinion, they can be reduced to quantum theory …” So, I have to go with The ‘Blind Spot’ authors who state that “…everything we humans know and experience, naturally including scientific activities, rests upon the foundation of direct bodily experience.”
I think it is imperative for anyone who is serious about such things (or just plain interested) to have a basic, ‘self’ understanding of what our favourite subjects – consciousness, mind, self, free will etc. are. Here’s my take on this: –
Mind, for example, can’t really be anything else, but its contents – that is, my accumulated experiences, which together hold all the information that I believe is ‘me’, all the things I have learned and know, which go to make what I call ‘me’.
Consciousness and mind are one. Consciousness also is its contents and only feels different from mind in that the contents of mind appear on the screen of awareness – making us aware, or conscious (as we put it) of information the brain generates in that moment. Both the experience of mind and consciousness emanate from the brain’s complex network. And, very simply, the construct we call ‘me’, or my ‘self’ emerges from the multitude of contents housed in this complex network.
From this understanding, all the questions of what is the mind, self, consciousness, etc fall away, leaving just a superbly functioning organism that needs no input from a supposed separate mind, self, consciousness etc., as whatever arises in life, whatever thoughts or actions, are all determined by the brain/body organism in relationship with its particular environment – no ‘me’ needed.
It is not necessary for us to ponder how the brain does this; that is for the neuroscientists and philosophers, etc. It is enough for us to see or realise that these aspects of the brain/body organism are just nature’s way of keeping us alive and functioning.
—
Spence, just to clarify, I didn’t write that piece on the ‘big bang’ (June 22, 2026). As I stated, I saw it in a news item and thought it relevant to the post. I don’t know anything about such concepts – only what the scientists come up with.
Hi Ron!
Thanks for the clarification.
You wrote:
“Consciousness and mind are one. Consciousness also is its contents and only feels different from mind in that the contents of mind appear on the screen of awareness – making us aware, or conscious (as we put it) of information the brain generates in that moment. Both the experience of mind and consciousness emanate from the brain’s complex network. And, very simply, the construct we call ‘me’, or my ‘self’ emerges from the multitude of contents housed in this complex network.
“From this understanding, all the questions of what is the mind, self, consciousness, etc fall away, leaving just a superbly functioning organism that needs no input from a supposed separate mind, self, consciousness etc., as whatever arises in life, whatever thoughts or actions, are all determined by the brain/body organism in relationship with its particular environment – no ‘me’ needed.”
Here is an alternative theory, the one that is supported by the experience of the mystic: Consciousness is the lake upon which all reality across all dimensions ripples. The thoughts themselves are ripples upon the lake of conscious awareness. The body and all matter are also ripples on that lake of spirit. Mind is just a ripple on a ripple. And all matter and thoughts are part of this very large sea of consciousness. We are all created. That sea of consciousness is a quantum field that exists within and exterior to time and space. It is One.
Any given thought can disappear, whole star systems can be destroyed, or birthed, but consciousness remains. If we can detach our attention from it’s attachment to thoughts, then the lake becomes clear and we become aware of so many, many other things that were invisible to us and have nothing whatsoever to do with “me” and “mine” and all my thoughts. And that is because we are already a very tiny part of consciousness, and therefore the connections are all there. To even say there is a “connection” when all we are is consciousness, all we are is information in a field of information, is to promote a notion of separateness that is an illusion. It is an illusion, you and I, created by our limited brain to function in this tiny tiny space of time and place.
Now, you may attempt to make a biological explanation. But it can never be complete. No center of consciousness has been found in the physical brain. It is a theory, resulting from this lack of evidence, that consciousness must therefore be some complex network of combinations within the brain that has no locus. It’s a nice theory, but just a theory. And if it’s so very complex, too complex to replicate, then it’s not even a theory. It’s just a conjecture.
It is, actually, much too complicated. A theory that relies on God or Spirit may seem to you adding one element too many. But a theory that relies upon the vagaries of our biochemistry alone with the explanation of “a complex network” that no one has teased out, requires too many convoluted theories that create incredibly complex hypothesis testing.
“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.” Wolfgang Pauli
https://youtu.be/Df_Z_SsMMq0?is=vzeyGoss2NujXTfe
But by the way you have the dastardly lion Gurinder and his sidekick Pepe Le Pew currently making the rounds in the United States and no one has anything to say about their lack of etiquette or speech?
Spence, just a one-off reply: –
We underestimate the function of the body/brain organism and fail to see that much of how we function as human beings is automatic and does not require a self, a mind or a separate consciousness. Only through the activity of thought (another function of the brain) do thoughts appear in the form of fears and insecurities that emerge as ideas, hopes and wishes that there is something more to life. And this is the tragedy of human life, wanting more than the everyday, every moment of experiencing this aliveness.
Hi Ron
I don’t think it’s always a matter of wanting more. Certainly not for the mystic. For them, less is more.
For some it is a matter of being something different than you have described.