The title of this blog post was the subtitle to an article by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan in the May 2, 2026 print edition of New Scientist, “The essence of reality.” It became the title of the online article, which I’ve shared below.
Is consciousness more fundamental to reality than quantum physics? | New Scientist
Here’s how the article starts out:
Imagine you could take a cosmic mixing bowl and cook up reality from scratch. It would be a strange kind of baking, with the end results including everything from space-time and satellites to cats and the cosmic web. But here’s the question: what would be the basic ingredient you’d need to use?
I first got introduced to this kind of question in seventh grade, sitting in a class I had never taken before: physics. Although this introductory class was mostly about balls rolling down hills, I was taught that the methods of physics ought to have limitless reach – an idea called reductionism. Physics should be able to identify the essential ingredients of reality and show how to combine them from scratch into anything and everything.
Immediately, I decided to become a physicist. But now, many years and several degrees later, I am less sure that physics holds all the answers. Take something like my sense of self: is that really a consequence of some equation that we haven’t yet derived? If I think about questions like these hard enough, I am left feeling rattled, wondering whether I have become a bad physicist.
So, I decided to engage with these doubts and work out what I really think about the essence of reality. I was inspired by two recent books that come at these questions from opposite ends of the spectrum. One argues that all reality is built from nothing more than quantum fields. “Everything else is just in our minds. All our concepts are illusions,” says its author, Liam Graham. The other insists that the most essential ingredient of reality is conscious experience. “That’s what is fundamentally real,” says Adam Frank at the University of Rochester in New York state, one of the book’s co-authors.
Deciding whether either of these stances – or something in between – is correct matters for more than just my own peace of mind. Assumptions about what is fundamental undergird how all science is done and may have long been confounding our attempts to answer some of the most stubborn scientific mysteries.
I love these sorts of questions. So naturally I bought both of the books mentioned above. The reality is built from quantum fields book is Physics Fixes All the Facts by Liam Graham. Somewhat strangely, Graham has a Ph.D. in Economics, though he also has a B.A. in Theoretical Physics. The conscious experience is essential book is The Blind Spot by Adam Frank (physicist), Marcelo Gleiser (physicist), and Evan Thompson (philosopher).
The Blind Spot arrived from Amazon first. I started reading it today. Makes a lot of sense, though the central thesis seems so obvious to me, I doubt that scientists really are oblivious to it.
We call the source of the meaning crisis the Blind Spot. At the heart of science lies something we do not see that makes science possible, just as the blind spot lies at the heart of our visual field and makes seeing possible. In the visual blind spot sits the optic nerve; in the scientific blind spot sits direct experience — that by which anything appears, shows up, or becomes available to us. It is a precondition of observation, investigation, exploration, measurement, and justification.
Things appear and become available thanks to our bodies and their feeling and perceiving capacities. Direct experience is bodily experience. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world,” says French philosopher Maurice Marleau-Ponty, but as we will see, firsthand bodily experience lies hidden in the Blind Spot.
So far, and I’m only a few pages into The Blind Spot, I haven’t found anything that I disagree with. Maybe because I’ve spent a lot of time in my life pondering the nature of consciousness and how objective reality relates to our inherently subjective experience. Probably most scientists really haven’t fully assimilated the fact that everything they know in both their everyday life, and their professional life, is only visible through the lens of direct experience.
I’m just curious to see how the authors of The Blind Spot can back up their claim in the Introduction that the Blind Spot is the cause of so many of the world’s ills. Again, I can’t disagree with this passage. I just feel that it is a bit (or maybe a lot) exaggerated. But I’m prepared to be convinced otherwise by this book.
The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral inthe cosmic scheme of things and that we’re central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises and what it means, we’ll never be able to understand science as a human activity and we’ll keep defaulting to a view of nature as something to gain mastery over.
Each of the cases just mentioned — cosmology and the origin of the universe, quantum physics and the nature of matter, biology and the nature of life, cognitive neuroscience and the nature of consciousness — represents more than an individual scientific field. Collectively they represent our culture’s grand scientific narratives about the origin and structure of the universe and the nature of life and the mind.
They underpin the ongoing project of a global scientific civilization. They constitute a modern form of mythos: they are the stories that orient us and structure our understanding of the world. For these reasons, the paradoxes these fields face are more than mere intellectual or theoretical puzzles.
They signal the larger unreconciled perspectives of the knower and the known, mind and nature, subjectivity and objectivity whose fracture menaces our project of civilization altogether. Our present-day technologies, which drive us ever closer to existential threats, concretize this split by treating everything — including, paradoxically, awareness and knowing ourselves — as an objectifiable, informational quantity or resource. It’s precisely this split — the divorce between knower and known and the suppression of the knower in favor of the known — that constitutes our meaning crisis.
The climate emergency, which arises from our treating nature as just a resource for our use, is the most pronounced and catastrophic manifestation of our crisis.
I could be wrong (an ever-present possibility), but here’s my suspicion. After reading both books, I suspect that I’m going to be convinced that two things can be true: quantum fields are indeed the foundation of reality, and direct experience indeed is how we know reality.
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“What is a quantum field? It is the unseen stage upon which the drama of the universe unfolds. It is the vibrating fabric that gives rise to all matter, energy, and interaction. In every corner of space, quantum fields fluctuate, interact, and shape the destiny of galaxies and atoms alike.” From Science News Today. May 2025,
There is no way I could really understand Quantum fields, even after reading up on it. All I could say was, ‘How do they know that? Whereas the other question posed here is: “… the most essential ingredient of reality is conscious experience. “That’s what is fundamentally real …”
I can talk of conscious experience because it is familiar to me – and to everyone else, I guess. IMO, the conscious experience occurs when the subject meets the object – whether that object is physical ‘out there’ or mental, in the form of thoughts or memories. With no objects, there is nothing to be conscious of. In deep sleep or unconsciousness, objects, whether mental or physical, do not arise in the brain, so consciousness does not manifest.
Conversely, even in deep sleep or being unconscious, there is still awareness. A noise registers through the sense of hearing and wakes one up. On awakening, images arise either mentally or physically – or both – and one becomes conscious of them. It seems to me that awareness is always present in the total organism, perhaps even in every cell. It would take a general anaesthesia – or death – to prevent the organism from being aware, unable to sense anything.
Unconscious, in my view, is not the ‘essential ingredient’ of reality, so if there is one, then perhaps quantum fields fill the gap.
Who cares
Some of the most interesting research on mediation tells us that in deep meditation, when much of the brain becomes silent, the awareness is heightened. And our cognitive functioning improves.
Perhaps the brain merely filters our awareness of reality, and that awareness expands as the functions of the brain are reduced, limited.
Then all matter, space and time are indeed consciousness waiting for us to raise our consciousness to the level of reality.
And a growing awareness, a raised consciousness results from the practice of putting mind aside.
The brain becomes aware of other things and people through intermediaries of senses and symbols.
But the awareness beyond mind, of that quantum field of consciousness is direct. We merge into it. We become it. Then there is no object and observer, no duality.
1) There is no climate emergency.
2) Humans have always been technological beings. From our earliest ancestors to the present day, we’ve relied on technology to extract, process, and use nature — the Earth’s resources — for survival and flourishing. This is not a recent corruption or a philosophical “split”; it is the defining characteristic of our lineage.
Resource use is not optional for any living thing.
Hi Sant 64
The huge islands of floating plastic garbage in the pacific are now home to newly forming coral. There is 620,000 square miles of floating garbage islands now. Nature takes pollution and does many wonderful things with it to adapt. When we look at the body, it is constantly adapting. But it is imperfect, it never does a permanent job. We can learn from this to see what is harmful and try our best to adapt also, just as the body. The body doesn’t ignore poison. It tries to adapt as best it can.
We can too, by first acknowldging the poisons we create in the thousands of millions of metric tons every year. Acknowldge the harm these things do. There is no need to live in denial just to excuse inaction. We were not meant for inaction. Then what can we do to help eliminate toxic things we have accidently manufacture in huge quantities, like lead, mercury and other harmful things that exist now in such large degrees that their lethal effect on the emvironnent has been researched and demonstrated for decades.
As for industrial pollution, C02 emissions and global warming, the correlation is extremely high. And where we see areas of unusually high health damage, defect and cancer in children and thermal change, these are often in proximity to polluting factories.
So there is certainly enough evidence in total to prove pollution is very bad for human beings and other living things. We should find a better way to make use of earth’s limited resources.
Stewardship is part of God’s assignment to humanity.