If the Universe Is One Consciousness, the Creator Is You

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Created April 19, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The world’s most acclaimed quantum mechanics and relativity physicists including Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, John Wheeler, and Stephen Hawking dealt with consciousness in ways that have not, to my knowledge, been looked at by philosophers for their possible implications.

Physicists are a very useful subset of philosophers—especially when physicists deal with things beyond the physical.

Originally, physicists were not willing to deal with the non-physical; they left that to the metaphysicists and metaphysicians. Over time, two things changed:

    1. Energy, which, being invisible, was not considered physical, was reassigned to be covered by physicists.
    2. Metaphysics became lumped with superstition and religion as being outside the field of science.

Then, Einstein came along and included the observer in his thought experiments, allowing consciousness to be included in the mathematics of relativity. Heisenberg showed that the observer influenced the outcome of the experiment.

Einstein was convinced that quantum mechanics was not a complete description of reality, and he attempted to prove it by means of the EPR Paradox, which continues to be debated with a lot of difficult math by many brilliant scientists, without any final resolution. The closest thing to a resolution might be the little-known analysis by Belgian physicist Diederik Aerts which showed that quantum mechanics could not describe two separate physical systems – suggesting that the universe/multiverse cannot be more than one single system.

Einstein wanted a complete description of reality and found it hard to reconcile that with what he called “spooky action at a distance”. All of his early thinking had been based on the classical physics in which action at a distance had been ruled out and replaced by the idea of the exchange of invisible particles/wavicles in the space between objects which accounts for the illusion that they are acting upon one another. This exchange of invisible particles is a simple extension of the colliding billiard balls picture of reality which underpins all of physics all the way back and to this day.

Magnetism and gravity were satisfactorily explained using this concept. However quantum entanglement suggests that either space/distance is an illusion, or that the billiard balls being exchanged between the once-connected-physically-but-now-separated items are allowed to move much faster than the speed of light, in fact, with instantaneity.

Physicists are still debating these things today. The debates disappear if the universe happens to be one single consciousness. One Single Consciousness (OSC) is the one theory (proposed in 1976 by me as The Theory of the Conscious Universe, “TTOTCU”) I know of which explains all of the experimental and observed evidence.

The closest that physicists have come to my TTOTCU theory is Wheeler’s concept of the Participatory Anthropic Principle. This states that consciousness is the factor which converts probability waves into concrete states of physical and energetic reality. I’m pretty sure he thought of TTOTCU and recognized that he would be taking a big chance to embrace it. Instead, his theory was that matter and energy existed before consciousness, but only as probability waves, never frozen into specific forms and events, until the universe somehow evolved life forms with consciousness that now gave the universe the ability to be specific.

I find it easier to swallow TTOTCU than Wheeler’s bootstrap. In my bootstrap, the Nothingness recognizes itself as experiencing the receipt of information (i.e. a consciousness, a self) and then discovers it can imagine and create information for its own consumption. And that it can spin off avatars which can either remember their original identity or not, depending on what the universe’s game might be at the moment.

Nevertheless, since I am only a philosopher and not a physicist (as I had originally intended), I was greatly heartened to read the last book written by Stephen Hawking in which he included Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle in his own summation of reality. This gave me a leg to stand on despite the disparagement of philosophers by some scientists who call us “scientists without laboratories”.

So my Mission in life as I interpret it is to, as best I can, bring into popular awareness two things, TTOTCU and metacognition operational methodologies which have worked for me. Since I am a scientist at heart I do not proclaim that these ideas are facts, but that they are real possibilities. The entire universe/multiverse may be a single consciousness. In which case, you and I are missionaries from that consciousness into this created world which exists within the imagination of the one consciousness, a singularity which exists above time and space.

Just accept for the sake of argument that this could be the true situation. Look at where we are as a species. We have been fooled into thinking that all of this physical stuff around us is what is real, and that it all came about by the collisions of matter and energy bits, accidentally. Therefore, that there is no higher meaning or purpose to life or existence, there is nothing to stand in awe and wonder of.

Naturally, with that as the prevailing worldview (most people act as if this is what they believe, although some of us partition off our faith in a specific religion as something we also believe, but when we come out of the temple we soon begin hating and competing again) it is obvious why we have established authoritarian governments to protect us from criminals, and although seeming to be getting away from that for the past couple of thousand years it is once again flooding back front and center to apparently about half of us even in the most democratic nations.

In other words, if TTOTCU happens to be correct, but almost no one on the planet accepts that in their gut yet, we are all betting on the traditional view of materialism and accidentalism, living in fear, complaining, blaming, and having fun mostly in escapist ways. This seems to us on a subconscious level to be the most rational approach given that there is no way of knowing whether TTOTCU is reality or bunk. Or is there a way of knowing?

I find that by maintaining awareness that TTOTCU might be the reality, I am constantly receiving new information in my mind that surprises inspires, and delights me. When I fall from this state into one of fear and negativity and attachment to outcomes, I become cut off from that Muse. I detect pragmatic value by keeping my mind open to the TTOTCU possibility. This is where metacognition comes in. You too can experiment with entertaining the TTOTCU possibility in your own lives and seeing if there are any pragmatic benefits you receive as a result.

Cooperation with others becomes the basic operation principle in a world that recognizes the possibility of TTOTCU.

Game theory comes in here as well. In game theory one inspects each alternative one has within some defined “game”, and then imagines what the outcome will be from taking this route or that one. My assertion from decades of self-experimentation is that it causes more “wins” to keep one’s mind open to the very real possibility that we are all a single consciousness. It causes fewer “wins” to rule TTOTCU out as bunk.

Negativity is self-defeating. This is consistent with Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle. We get out what we put in. It is not as simple as “manifesting” whatever we set our minds to, that is an oversimplification that goes much too far and ignores the interaction among all of the different “dinner orders” being requested by all the particles of consciousness – you and me and each of the rest of us. But it is true that Garbage In, Garbage Out – the love you take is equal to the love you make – if you put in negativity you will get back negativity – if you put in constructiveness and well wishes to all, you get back a happier world.

We call the objects we humans create “artifacts” or “artefacts”.

Einstein felt strongly that the universe is a Godifact, but preferred other terms such as Nature, and the intelligence behind Nature, the Creator.

Intention node is another name for avatar. I have also called us attention nodes, particles of consciousness, psions. Quantum theory appears to require that everything is definitely one connected system. Consciousness is something each of us avatars has, and perhaps someday our memory blocks will be released and we will remember our true identity, and even remember the moment we first realized ourself.

Gold In Gold Out

Negative In Negative Out

Positive In Positive Out

Love In Love Out

Opportunities = what we today feel are the insurmountable problems about to destroy us and the planet – our own doing – we understandably (because of not knowing the TTOTCU lens is a real possibility) are down in the dumps about our condition. As long as we continue to be stuck in that old way of looking at things, we will just make things worse. We need to exercise our courage and our free will to open our minds to a new position of clarity and openness to entirely new ideas, and to see us as lucky to be the generations alive today at the turning point in history, where we take ourselves in hand and set up the new system of the world.

Love to All,
Bill

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SPECIAL EDITION: An Eye for An Eye

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Created April 15, 2024
Special Edition

The Iranian tactic has an ancient basis in the respective bibles of the “People of The Book.” As a species we have known for a long time the disastrous consequences of escalation.

This demo by Teheran starts a new era in geopolitik.

It was prophesied in my 2022 novel Pandemonium: Live To All Devices. Not to make more of a spoiler than necessary, a virtual reality television star leads a coalition to prevent escalation, sort of a global NATO, and it works by careful judgment of the optimal degree of retaliation (e.g. page 457).

Israel will now know that unmanned missile and drone attacks are the preferred mode of making “just enough” reparations. Next time there is an October 7th type action. But can anyone afford one more such action?

Does this new context offer an increased feeling of safety, that forms of mischief which have been vaguely tolerated in the past, fighting terrorists but not the people that sent them, those mischief forms are now off the table? Would anyone blame Israel for using these same air missile and drone tactics on Iran if there were to be one further provocation?

Should not everyone take the moment to back away from provocations they are causing right now? Start quietly winding them down?

We have reached a moment that was easy to see coming. For the past 8 years and even longer, governments around the world have been continuing to rattle sabers and appear as strong as possible to one another, as if we were still using TNT, as if bioweapons and cyberweapons and thermonuclear weapons and propaganda weapons were still back at the primitive WWII level.

A bunch of macho men in a life raft, each loaded to the gills with all sorts of exotic and superpowerful weaponry, goading each other in a dominance drill that goes on for a seeming eternity, until one of them accidentally shoves another due to a sudden ocean swell, and there is an explosive bloody free-for-all, which they all call off when they see they are all going to die.

That’s where we are folks.

Time to bring cooperation and competition back in balance.

We have been unbalanced in the competition direction as far back as we can see in written history.

The Greeks and the Romans made slightly better use of cooperation for a time, and rose as empires as a result.

These United States have until recently (with the exception of the Civil War) shown an amazing degree of cooperation. The Native American tribes had been the inspiration for the Federalist philosophy of government which the Founders adopted. This gave us the States.

If we are – the whole universe is – a single consciousness at play, this would explain the reason why cooperation works so well. It’s natural to our nature.

Nature also shows us competition, for mates, for land, for food.

We are hard wired and soft wired for both cooperation and competition.

Hard wired meaning in our physical structure including nervous system. Soft wired meaning programmed by our experiences.

Perhaps we were looking to the animals as our role models when we started off on this competition kick, where cooperation is less to be seen. And yet we see incredible cooperation among cetaceans, fish, birds, certain insects. In WWII we saw incredible cooperation by the Allies. We saw it on April 13th (EDT) when so many nations pitched in to work against an attack.

The U.S. Congress which has been commandeered and far from successfully achieving actual cooperation, is not going to play deaf to this wakeup call “courtesy” of Iran. If the public does not see a change in behavior it will demand the immediate removal of obstructors, those who show no sincere intention to legislate for the good of the public. I think we will see improvement before it goes that far. The moment calls for showing that one is alert to some need to change something. And that it cannot be delayed, procrastination rarely helps in a fire.

No more nonsense.

My Best to all,
Bill

What Is Consciousness?

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Created April 12, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Consciousness is the subjective experience of receiving information.
In that sense, it is a verb.

Consciousness is also the “stuff” that has those subjective experiences (qualia). In that sense, it is also a noun.

What do I mean by “receiving information”? I define the information we, the consciousnesses receiving this post, receive, as: what comes in through the five known physical senses, plus the feelings/emotion, intellect, intuition, imagination, memory, subconscious, and whatever else we might have rattling around in there.

It is all information.

Physicist John Wheeler concluded late in his life that the underpinning to the Universe consists of information, which turns into things (“Its”) by following the instructions coded into the information (“Bits”).

In the beginning, there was the Word.

This all becomes simple and self-evident if the first object to exist was a single consciousness.

But wait, what do we mean by the “stuff” of consciousness? Of what stuff is consciousness made?

Are we talking about which specific brain cells consciousness resides in?

No. My theory is that consciousness pre-exists matter. The brain, being matter, interacts with consciousness but is not the original source of consciousness, in my view.

The “stuff” consciousness is made of is immaterial, pure information, data encoded in the formation it is in. For example, a vee formation of birds flying from your left to your right. By its vee formation, it conveys to you the information that birds are capable of understanding coordination with one another on some level. All information is a pattern of dots in one medium or another. The information can be passed along because of the specific formation it is being carried within. In-formation=information.

But passed along to whom? And by whom? And for what purpose? Why is this all happening?

One way it could have happened was that nothingness discovered it could send itself information. And that therefore it never really was nothingness. It was consciousness waiting to discover itself. With nothing happening, there was nothing to observe, except nothingness.

The first official act of nothingness emerging as consciousness was – I postulate – an act of imagination.

Although probably more of a feeling than words at that primordial event, the information passed along to itself was something like “what else could exist as well as all of this boring nothingness?”

Once consciousness learns all of what it can do with imagination, it evolves into US. All of us. Everything, all matter, all energy, all multiverses, all time, all space, all objects sentient by current era human definition and all objects not sentient by current era human definition.

It’s playing a game for the benefit of the information it is passing itself.

Everything exists to serve consciousness.

Yet on this fringe of the Milky Way outpost planet, the prevailing culture denigrates consciousness. It’s been ok for physics, the dominant science, to virtually ignore it for centuries. Skinner deemed it an epiphenomenon, not the decision maker it pretends to be.

Not all manifestations of consciousness have been equally denigrated. The way athletes and performers and artists and writers use their consciousnesses has been given value and appreciation. The intuition, subconscious, feelings/emotions, and especially the sense of spirituality, less so.

Most of us are afraid to act on our hunches until the opportunity is blown.

The universe is set up to receive information from itself, and the value which is its purpose is in the information received.

Along the way, stuff happens. In some backwaters the natives so misunderstand the nature of reality and how to literally make the most out of the opportunity, they live their lives in fear. Sound like anybody you know?

Why science took the road it did, centuries ago, to institutionalize a bias favoring the working hypothesis that the universe is material and accidental, we may never know. Perhaps it’s as simple as leaning away from the sense of there having been a Creator.

And yet one of our top physicists of all time, Albert Einstein, found accidentalism to be counter to his own intuition of a vast intelligence which Created the universe.

At any rate, wouldn’t it have been predictable, 300 years ago, when the materialistic accidentalism movement was only nascent, that if it ever became the unstated global cultural last word in science and philosophy, the human race would by then have become debased of nobility and exist in a hedonistic morally ambiguous state of terror?

What else could we become once brainwashed into believing that science has proven the universe to be an accident in which only the material world matters, consciousness is second class, and those with greater power can do what they want with the rest of us – at any moment, out of the blue.

The social and cultural implications of this side-road science chose hundreds of years ago have been tragic and have left our dominant view of the future to be one of dystopia.

Only by opening our minds to the other possibilities that scientifically exist, some of which suggest that the universe has a self-interest in us, since it is us, can we debias our own minds which have become infected with this pessimistic belief for which no empirical proof exists.

Only by debiasing our own minds to an epistemologically unbiased view of the truth, i.e., we have no idea what is really going on here, can we look around and start to collect unbiased evidence ourselves of whether we sometimes see a benevolence behind the scenes, if we sometimes do have excellent hunches that come true, if we do sometimes read other people’s minds. Once the mind is open to experience reality without rooting for one possible model over another, pragmatism can take control without needing optimism nor pessimism as locked-in requirements.

Life evermore is a possibility if the universe is a single consciousness. That would be experienced by us as still being conscious after bodily death, and having experiences quite unlike Earth, perhaps before adopting another material form on Earth or elsewhere, or an energy form someplace, or being joined directly into the Original Self.

This could be more fun than imagining WWIII or all of the other self-destruction scenarios with nonzero probabilities at the moment. Without the morbid accidentalism locked in, we can let ourselves work toward building utopia. Of course, the crowd will always mock idealists whenever possible, so maintain the pragmatist compass in order to be a proper role model inspiring others.

Tag line:

Let’s stay open to the Good.

Love to all,
Bill

Science, Spirituality, and “Woo-Woo”

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Created April 5, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

“Woo-Woo” is defined as “unconventional beliefs regarded as having little or no scientific basis, especially those relating to spirituality, mysticism, or alternative medicine.”

I’m grateful that there is not yet a derogatory term for “theories of universe grounded in science which are not in conflict with spirituality”.

As you may know, my books do not assert the existence of God, but point out that we could all be part of a single consciousness, a consciousness which could have the qualities we as a species have generally intuited for God – omnipresence, omnipotence, and benevolence.

My main emphasis in these books is that we should keep an open mind, and in our decisions and actions take into account the possibility that this is the truth—that we should be empirically scientific toward our own experiences, and objectively observe if the one-consciousness lens is useful in understanding what goes on in our lives.

Rather than filtering out our hunches and inspirations, our blatant experiences of telepathy and empathy (understanding, emotional telepathy), and our spiritual intuitions. EOP, Emergency Oversimplification Procedure, is the instantaneous dichotomistic bucketing of everything into good vs. bad based on accumulated imitative conditioning, without giving any fresh thought to any matter.

As a species we have been driven into the EOP condition by a combination of Acceleritis, accelerating information overload, plus the dominant unsupported assumption of Western science since circa 1800 that the material world is all that exists and that it came about by accident.

In that science thus constrained, the importance of consciousness has been generally belittled.

Stellar exceptions: William James, Jung, Einstein, Wheeler, and Hawking — who in his last book held up Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle as part of Hawking’s own worldview. By the implications of their thinking, these renowned scientists all opened the door to the possibility of a universe which is a consciousness. None of them, however, took it that far.

Einstein, like Thales and Spinoza, had spiritual feelings aimed at the universe and at the intelligence which had created it. By bringing the observer into his thought experiments, Einstein snuck consciousness back into science’s picture of reality, thus discovering relativity.

These great thinkers were resuscitating animism, originally emerging as the first natural religion, essentially the feeling that the Creator is in everything. The native Americans shared these same spiritual feelings.

Animism never went on to become a formalized religion, that was pantheism, its next stage of evolution toward today’s dominant monism – which within Hinduism still contains a pantheistic pantheon as masks of the One, as established by the Upanishads.

Neither Spinoza nor Einstein saw any conflict between their animism and Judaism. This is key. What it says is that not only is it possible that we are part of a field of consciousness which invented matter-energy-spacetime, it also says that there is no distance between that and the beliefs and values of the world’s religions, that it is all internally consistent, integrity exists, science is its mental emanation, spirituality is its emotional emanation.

Will we then all become more positive about life and about each other? It would be natural, once we get out of the habit of implicitly putting down all spirituality because of some Woo-Woo extremists.

But Thales, Spinoza, Einstein, and many other people have experienced that moment, that rush, of spiritual realization, when one suddenly gets it— that there could be a scientific God.

We might not be limited to this world, this one lifetime.

One suddenly has a sense of cosmic resonance, of the importance of being.

We know that consciousness exists. We know that with much more certainty than we know that matter exists since we experience matter through our senses, which are part of our consciousness.

So it would be illogical to deny the possibility of a much larger consciousness.

Woo-Woo is another form of EOP. Oversimplification. It is not necessarily something that happens to people as a result of their own spiritual realizations, it might have been transmitted to them by friends and associates and/or by social media or books they’ve read.

Because Woo-Woo is essentially authoritarian and faith-based, it is a belief system and does not rely upon scientific support. It tends to be open-ended i.e. pretty much anything goes.

Back in the 70s when psychedelics first reached a mass audience, both spiritual realizations and Woo-Woo began to spread through the world culture. Two parallel and related processes.

Today there are about a thousand times more books published per year about Woo-Woo than in the 70s. They are almost all well-intended. A few are cryptopolitical propaganda. The field does much more good than harm, in my estimation.

Getting people to be less negative is a good thing. It would be better to do that with less exaggeration and fewer black-and-white generalizations. But game theory proves that optimism is more utilitarian than pessimism. Yes, Woo-Woo goes too far, but I wouldn’t waste time putting people down. Better to help Woo-Woo folks metacognize, recognize, and master their own egos, reopen their minds to all possibilities, and move up into the Observer and Flow states, and out of Woo-Woo followership.

Mixing Woo-Woo with politics is a sure sign that it is the most naïve, imitative form of Woo-Woo. Spirituality is above politics. If we are all one thing, factions are a mental illness.

Takeaway:

Don’t believe anything except your own experience, be observant and keep an open mind, test and learn, see if this one-consciousness lens is useful to you, realize Oneness as an ever-constant possibility.

My Best to all,
Bill

 

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