Something Out of Nothing

What if consciousness didn’t originate with human awareness? What if it was always out there, in the Universe, and our evolution allowed us to receive it, to connect with it? Consciousness happens at the nexus of human awareness and the Universe.

I don’t know that this is true, but I find it to be a fascinating and beautiful idea and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.

Recently, I had a quick chat with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. After catching up on life, we started talking about this topic, which just happened to coincide with some of my recent thoughts. We’ve talked about deep ideas before, we both enjoy exploring ideas that might be considered a bit “out there” He knew I was open to it and love to talk about things like this but him bringing it up, when I had been doing my own exploration into these ideas felt meaningful and somehow fated to be — the Universe pushing us to explore further. The idea that our consciousness, our ideas and thoughts about ourselves are both bigger AND smaller than us is interesting to contemplate. I was a Philosophy major, and for good reason — I love to explore interesting ideas like this. The theory is that consciousness comes from outside from an external quantum field and our brains have evolved in such a way that we can recognize it and interact with it. We assume that it’s our own, that it comes from within our own minds. In reality, it’s both, existence comes from the external field and our brain’s interaction with it, and our interpretation of it.

I’ve always been a deep thinker (some might say over thinker). I like following the threads of topics that interest me and this one has come up in several different contexts lately, most recently when catching up with a good friend. I haven’t had the capacity to do this kind of mental exploration for a while; I was too busy managing systems and people (which I also enjoy) and solving more immediate problems. I enjoy having the luxury of sitting with ideas and questions that don’t necessarily have answers, that fascinate me for exactly that reason, they are unanswerable. I appreciate having the time and mental energy to sit with deeper, unsettled, sometimes unsettling questions again.

I do believe there’s an efficiency and elegance to our evolution, all of life’s evolution. As weird and messy as it can be in the short term, over the eons it somehow finds the best, most efficient way to exist in the world. Our brains are powerful information processors — a four pound lump of meat, astonishingly energy efficient, better than any computer we’ve built. Maybe that efficiency isn’t just clever biology. Maybe we’re not generating consciousness so much as tuning into it.

After the conversation yesterday, I brought up the topic with AI to help me process my thoughts on it a little further and it came up with a great quote towards the end of the conversation:

“We are talking about the nature of thought because, in a very real way, the universe is using both of us right now to try and understand itself.”

I don’t know if that’s true — it’s a grand anthropomorphism — but it’s a beautiful idea, and and the conversation with my friend felt like evidence of it. I’ve missed having the time and energy for this kind of thinking, exploration, and discovery. I’m learning to trust the Universe again, and to allow things to unfold as they will.