Consciousness and reality

Consciousness

Introduction

The moment I encounter the word “consciousness,” neurological correlations and brain activity immediately spring to mind. Yet, I’m left with a sense that something is missing. When I delve deeper, I realize that while our hearts and kidneys function in essentially the same way for everyone – indeed, every organ operates with remarkable similarity across individuals – consciousness and its neurological underpinnings seem different. Yes, the fundamental structure might be the same, but the subjective experience feels entirely unique.

What Makes It Different?

We are all composed of the same basic particles, and despite forming similar biological structures, our consciousness remains distinct. When we ponder the "why" behind this, our initial thought might be our unique genetic code, a result of being born to different parents. However, this explanation feels inadequate. Even siblings, who share a significant portion of their genetic material, possess individual consciousness. While our genetic code contributes to our physical appearance and structure, consider identical twins, A and B. Born at the same time and raised in the same environment, they might share certain deep connections, yet they remain separate individuals. Therefore, we can conclude that who we truly are is our consciousness.

How We Formed

The fundamental building blocks of our physical reality are fundamental particles, which then combine to create atoms. This could even be expressed as a kind of basic equation:

Fundamental Particles + Time = Atoms

It appears that these fundamental particles exist even before forming atoms. In this initial stage, both the existence of individual particles and the subsequent formation of atoms represent stable forms of reality. However, the atomic stage, and everything built upon it, is not permanently stable; it’s a temporary reality. We currently exist within this temporary reality – the world of what we see, feel, touch, and smell, all of which are temporary formations.

Consciousness and the World

Our sensory system is connected to our brain, which is why our sensory experiences often dominate our thoughts. However, the very input for these sensory thoughts originates from our consciousness. Consider this example:

We see with our eyes, but we perceive through our consciousness. If we look at and observe a stone, we perceive its shape, color, and texture. Our eyes don’t simply “show” us these qualities; it’s our consciousness that interprets and presents this information to our awareness – it’s our consciousness that, in a way, “imagines” it. This experience, processed through consciousness, is then recorded and stored as memory. Whenever we recall the stone, our consciousness replays this recorded experience, along with any other memories that might be associated with it.

Based on my observations, consciousness seems to generate our thoughts and then refine them. It’s through this ongoing process that our consciousness essentially shapes who we are.

Consciousness also appears to exist in a kind of superposition, meaning we can’t predict our next thought. This unpredictable nature, where multiple possibilities exist until a 'thought occurs,' bears a metaphorical resemblance to the Schrödinger's cat experiment, where the cat in a sealed box is neither definitively dead nor alive until the box is opened. Furthermore, consciousness might even act symmetrically, much like time at a microscopic level, where time moves both forward and backward in a complex way. Imagine a ball on a frictionless table moving and colliding with others; the impact generates energy and a kind of “experience.” If you were to reverse the scenario, the same energy and experience would be reproduced. Similarly, our consciousness seems to revisit past experiences, replaying emotions and sensations, almost as if moving backward in time within our subjective reality. While I'm not suggesting consciousness and fundamental particles are the same, I'm drawing a metaphorical comparison to highlight certain similarities in their seemingly probabilistic and dynamic nature.

Furthermore, we can’t directly perceive or experience anything beyond the limitations of our sensory system. However, when we expand our consciousness, our perception shifts. Take the Big Bang theory, for instance. Almost everyone has heard of it. But try to truly imagine space and time being born after the Big Bang’s expansion. How can something expand without pre-existing space? This kind of logic and anything we haven’t personally experienced can be incredibly difficult for us to perceive or fully grasp.

Expanding Consciousness

We can expand our consciousness through practices like meditation, focused observation, and deep thinking. Therefore, our sensory system, guided by consciousness, helps us perceive what we consider the secondary formation of reality. By expanding our consciousness, we might be able to perceive the primary constituents of reality.

This leads to the question: if consciousness seems so fundamental, what about the brain? In my view, consciousness is also a part of the brain, perhaps in a formless and invisible way it acts independently. When we describe consciousness as invisible and formless, it can feel less believable because it’s beyond our direct sensory experience. Consider energy, for example. Everyone believes in energy, yet it doesn’t have a tangible form and is invisible; we only see its transmission paths. The true nature of energy is unknown. Similarly, electricity and the wires and transformers that carry it are vastly different from the electricity itself. The visible, physical part of the brain controls our physical body and sensory system.

Karma, Consciousness, and Predetermined Fate

Is there a connection between these three? In my previous thoughts, I suggested that life is predetermined and that the purpose of life is experience. If there’s no free will, is everything already known? In a way, yes, because our understanding of karma might be incomplete or even incorrect. The common understanding is that good deeds lead to good outcomes, and bad deeds to bad outcomes.

But what if we look at karma from a different perspective? What if karma is simply experience? Consider two friends, A and B, traveling from city C to city D, a three-hour journey. They miss their train and have to take a bus. That's karma in action – two different conscious experiences of the same event. On the return journey, A might dislike the train while B enjoys it. The feeling and experience through consciousness – that’s what I see as karma. In the bus scenario, A might feel good, and B bad. This doesn’t mean A did something good to the bus and bad to the train; if we want to experience the bus travel as good, we might first need to experience something less enjoyable. In simple terms, it’s just experience. This is why we might call this a karmic world, an experience-driven world. Perhaps we experience things repeatedly, not necessarily within a single lifetime.

If we truly experience death, why would none of us recall it from memory? Think about medical operations where anesthesia is administered. This acts like a cheat code; our consciousness seems to assume our body is dead or in a deep sleep. We might temporarily lose consciousness, but the physical brain continues to function. Where does our consciousness go during this time? We don’t know for sure, but we can understand that it can be temporarily removed by force. Is it possible for consciousness to leave without force? Perhaps through deep meditation or sleep.

Another important point: when our consciousness is temporarily absent during an operation, do we feel pain or any sensory input? No. This clearly suggests that our sensory system alone isn’t enough; we need consciousness to actually perceive sensory input.

When consciousness is absent from our body, we can’t perceive anything from our temporary reality. This is similar to the idea of death – it’s beyond our current experience, which is why we can’t experience it. In short, we need our body and consciousness together to experience something that isn’t fundamentally real.

It might seem like life is just about processing information, but it’s more than that. Life is an active construction of our reality through processing information. Consciousness doesn’t just make us individuals; it also differentiates our own experiences, even in seemingly similar situations.

For example, if you take a bowl of soup, the first sip and the last sip offer different experiences. One might argue that we reach a point of saturation, and the soup’s temperature decreases, leading to this difference. However, even upon close observation, the first and second sips would be distinct, not identical. This makes reality questionable. Is what we perceive as real truly real? If our reality is designed by our consciousness, then everything becomes questionable. Is red really red? What if we perceive red as blue – would it then be blue? That’s why I stated that the core reality is particles. But even going deeper and deeper, do we ultimately end up with nothingness?

Consciousness and Common Sense

We often talk about how consciousness makes each of us unique and how it even changes our own experiences in similar situations. Let's think about this a bit more deeply by using an analogy. Imagine a white light in your room. White light is actually a blend of many different colors, yet it appears simply "white" to you, to me, and to pretty much everyone. Sure, the exact shade of whiteness might vary slightly depending on different things, but it makes you wonder: if we're all such different individuals, why do we still perceive something so consistently?

Now, someone might argue that common sense – things like knowing a leaf is green or the sky is blue – is just how reality is, and that's why we all see it the same way. But let's take a closer look, especially at the animal and insect worlds. Animals perceive color and their surroundings differently; their reality is shaped by their biology. Whether we consider ourselves more "advanced" or not, if you compare our perception to an insect's, it can be drastically different. Some insects even experience time in a completely unique way.

Think about it – if some animals perceived red as a golden yellow, and some insects saw it as white (these are just examples, not scientifically accurate), then is the "reality" of red truly just "red"? What if there are beings far more advanced than us? How might they perceive red? It could be something beyond our wildest imagination. This makes the nature of reality itself seem questionable

This suggests the possibility of the universe communicating with consciousness or all consciousness being commonly connected. This could result in what we call common sense, or a shared, connected consciousness reality. While it might initially seem less believable, when we understand the capacity of consciousness, it might become more plausible. Our consciousness has the capacity to create illusions or a fabricated reality on top of the secondary reality. Everyone would agree with this on an individual level. But what if the same reality is created in all of us? Then we can’t really call it a fake reality. Furthermore, what if it’s not created in all of us but in a large group? Then it becomes what we know as the Mandela effect.

Conclusion

I conclude we may be in the physical world, but we live in a consciousness world which is created by consciousness.