Quantum brain

By Amit Goswami

We all desire more meaning and purpose in our lives. A critical obstacle that you will need to surmount before achieving this worthy goal is your conditioned brain. Fortunately, you can reframe this obstacle as an opportunity for transformation to a new You -- in charge of your brain&

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Rose Publishers
• Release date: Mar 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9789354278143

Book preview

I Consciousness and the Brain

Today, most neuroscientists tell you that your brain is all that you are and the brain cannot change, more or less. They also tell you that your brain is a material machine, a cognizing computer of sorts. Then they debate about such things as the location of consciousness in your brain. Or what part of your brain’s actions is unconscious and what is conscious. That’s what researching consciousness means for them.

Are you more than your brain? You can be if your consciousness is beyond the brain. Brain scientists refute such proposals by accusing dualism. How can consciousness be a non-physical dual entity? If it were so, how does it interact with the material brain?

But now there is quantum physics which is giving us a revolutionary new track to think of consciousness and the brain. The quantum model of consciousness and the brain gives us predictions that avant-garde neuroscientists have verified in the laboratory. What happens to brain science when we look at consciousness as primary and the brain is quantum, not Newtonian and determined? This is the subject of this book.

Why is this important to you? Perhaps you are one of those people who are not happy with the idea of being a machine that cannot change. Because you know through your own experience that you can change; you have; you are not a machine.

You are not alone. Today, there are many people like you who are unhappy with the human condition most people live in: mecenteredness, negative emotional behaviors dominating them, pleasure-seeking that leads to addiction—these features are built into the brain. There are psychological and spiritual traditions that are available and following their lead anyone can make some changes in their lives, and hence live better. The psychological and spiritual techniques, however, are incomplete as are their explanations.

This all should make you curious: Does science have an explanation contrary to the ones mainstream neuroscientists provide?

The answer in this book is: yes. Quantum science has explanations:

1) Of why the brain behaves the way it does giving you that base-level human condition — me-centeredness, negative emotional brain circuits, pleasure and addiction;

2) Of why and how the psychological and spiritual techniques, old and new, work so that everyone can use them to improve the behavior of their brains.

And the best part of the book is this: now that we know how the brain came to what it is, now that quantum science gives us a verified scientific theory of how the brain works, we can build on the existing techniques of transformation and make it very comfortable for you to live with your brain and use such methods optimally for accomplishing your goals in life.

The key to understanding the brain is to understand consciousness and its relation to the brain. What is consciousness? Consciousness is a ‘what?’ that is hard to talk about. Think about it. What we talk about within our science that is developing for the past four centuries we call objects, things, stuff, entities. Is consciousness an object? Does it have a location? You say, why not if neuroscientists talk about consciousness as an object. But better be careful. These are scientists who believe in a dogma called material monism that every whatwe talk about is an object, in fact a material object. You know the saying, If you have a hammer in your hand, you see the world as nails.

There is another saying that will set you straight. What we are looking for is what is looking. Yes; that is the problem: consciousness is both the looker and the looked at; both the subject and the object of an experience. And scientists, who look at consciousness as only an object, miss the boat to begin with.

The problem is that no neuroscientist knows how to introduce a subject in traditional science, the tradition that the great Newton had created for us. Newton’s science still dominates and sets the context and the worldview of most scientists and most science. And that includes most of psychology, —science of the psyche, our internal world, and virtually all of neuroscience —science of the neurons and the conglomerate they make, the brain.

Let’s talk about psychology a bit. Modern psychology made an impact on all of us because of Freud’s revolutionary work introducing the concept of the unconscious. What is unconscious? Unconscious is consciousness of which we are not aware. It is conscious awareness that brings about the quandary of a subject looking at objects, the subject-object split. The subject/self is the first person I that you and we all experience.

All kinds of questions crop up when we try to apply science to understand Freud. Is unconscious a separate domain of reality outside of our space-time-matter-motion world? Freud and his followers or ‘depth psychologists’ believe so. There is that question of dualism again. It is so difficult to explain it that scientists generally avoid talking about the unconscious.

Neuroscientists talk about unconscious brain actions, arousal of awareness and conscious brain actions. But without having a distinction between subject and object, without a distinction between unconscious and conscious, all this talk just boils down to sophistry, play of words to hide the real problem.

Go back to an earlier time, perhaps as early as seven thousand years, yes seven thousand years. Then in India, a bunch of people, Indian culture calls them rishis (rishi is a Sanskrit word meaning sage) but I would call them the first scientists of consciousness studies, had a solution to the problem, sort of. Again, the problem is to distinguish between unconscious and conscious awareness. And these scientists of consciousness of the old proclaimed a solution: Consciousness, a Oneness, is reality, One and only. Creating an illusion to experience itself as separate from itself, it splits itself into two, a subject looking at object(s).

Why should the Oneness do that, split itself that is?you ask, as many people before you have asked. The traditional answer was, It is a play. Later the Oneness came to be known as God; and then the manifest world where subjects look at objects separate from themselves was called God’s play in the playground that the world is.

These initial explorers of consciousness sang the glory of both the creator (Oneness) and the created (the world of separateness). But their followers misunderstood. If the world is created via an illusion, why bother about the world?

You may have seen the movie Matrix where a villain manipulates you via programs in your head from outside or the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation where the idea of a holodeck appears—the apparently human play in the world could be a play of holographic images in a holographically projected world, couldn’t it? The notion of a being creating the world by illusion sure sounds like these later ideas where more modern terms are used: programmer and programs. No wonder modern scientists call those original researchers of consciousness Mystics.

But of course, the way the followers of the original researchers interpreted their gurus was plain wrong; they did not think adroitly. The world we play in has order, cause and effect; and purpose: the orderly part of the world evolves producing more and more order. And the evolution is all lawful and purposeful. Illusions don’t exhibit order that lasts and keeps growing for billions of years.

Quantum Physics

The scientific breakthrough for thinking about consciousness came as a big surprise that all creative breakthroughs are accompanied with quantum physics, a new physics that has replaced the old Newtonian physics for almost a century and supports the Indian rishis’ solution that our subject-object duality comes from Oneness. The understanding came in stages:

1. Possibility nature of objects: It was recognized that quantum objects are waves of possibility; only when measured, they become particles of actuality;

2. Non-locality: When two possibility waves interact locally, that is, coming close together, they become correlated or entangled. What this means is radical: these correlated objects communicate instantly, without requiring signals. Why is this radical? Because Einstein’s theory of relativity shows that in space and time all objects can interact or communicate only via signals that move only with a finite speed for which the limit is the speed of light. Instant communication is called non-local;

3. The measurement problem: Since all material objects, both micro and macro, are quantum objects of possibility in principle (though we recognize that at the macro-level the behavior approaches Newtonian), what defines a measurement? There is a mathematical theorem, von Neuman’s theorem, which says that no material interaction can convert a possibility wave into actuality. A non-material agency is required.

When we measure a quantum object like an electron, we use a measurement apparatus like a photographic film or a bunch of Geiger counters. Von Neuman’s theorem makes them all impotent to do their job! Perhaps the only exception is the observer if we grant that he has nonmaterial consciousness. Thus, we arrive at the big question of measurement: Does observer’s consciousness collapse or convert quantum waves of possibility into particles of actuality?

4. The paradox of observer’s friend: But then a paradox also arises —suppose the observer’s friend measures the electron at the same time as the observer. A possibility wave of an electron exists in many possible positions all at the same time (like all waves do); the collapse must consist of consciousness choosing one of these possible positions into actuality. Now suppose the friend chooses a different position than our observer. Whose choice counts? No reasonable criterion exists to discern why one observer’s choice should count more than another’s. And obviously, both observers’ choice cannot manifest for the same localized event.

In 1985, in a flash of creative insight about the meaning of quantum physics, I (Amit) was able to comprehend the explanation of all of these puzzles:

1. Quantum waves of possibility reside in a domain outside space and time; let’s call it the domain of potentiality;

2. Any two objects in the domain of potentiality can correlate and communicate instantly. Instant communication means oneness since you can only communicate with yourself instantly. In this way, the domain of potentiality is a domain of potential Oneness. This Oneness is consciousness.

3. Measurement happens when this One consciousness chooses one actuality out of the many-faceted possibility wave. In the process, consciousness identifies with the observer’s manifest brain and becomes a subject looking at the object, the manifest electron at a specific position on a photographic film or at one Geiger counter out of the whole bunch.

4. There is no paradox of the observer’s friend because the choosing consciousness is one, the same for every observer.

This explains all the puzzles: split of the Oneness into subject and object, the role of the brain, even how to distinguish between unconscious and conscious. Unconscious is the Unmanifest or the Oneness; conscious is the space and time reality with subject-object split awareness. In effect, all those unresolved questions, unresolved for millennia, unresolved even after four hundred years of modern science are now solved.

Accordingly, I wrote a book, The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World, elucidating how the Oneness, Consciousness, creates and experiences the material world through us. Quantum physics is the physics of possibilities; additionally, it is also a physics of us subjects who experience the possibilities as they manifest. To repeat, my insight was that material quantum possibilities are consciousness’ own possibilities to choose from; as consciousness chooses, it splits into the experiencer subject (us) and the experienced material world.

So, we have to extend the scope of our physics beyond Newton’s version to quantum physics in order to include both the unconscious Oneness and the conscious awareness of subject-object split separateness. And then, the illusion we spoke of above that the rishis theorized, does not sound mystical and somebody’s whimsy — oppressive–anymore but perfectly logical, purposive, and scientific. Furthermore, we, the human subjects of experience, experience the objects of the world via the brain. Mystical thinking never explained the role of the brain; this is why I said when talking about these rishis’ work that they had a sort of solution of dualism. The new science does explain what the mystics could not, the important role of the brain.

Quantum Neuroscience

All good and settled? Not quite. Most scientists had already bought the dogma of material monism, all-is-matter philosophy, lock, stock and barrel; they are not ready to accept the primacy of consciousness. Fortunately, experimental scientists are not too much into philosophical dogma; they do their experiments whenever the technology is available. It is the neuroscientists and their new technologies applied to brain research that are giving revolutionary support not only to my original breakthrough work, but all the subsequent research Valentina and I have done for this book.

So here it is: a complete neuroscience of our consciousness and the varieties of our experiences. What is in the book that is useful for you the nonscientist seeker of who you are and how to be happy, in spite of the foibles of your brain, beyond what you can find in other books on the brain including my earlier books? Let us count the ways:

•Does quantum physics apply to your everyday life? A related scientific question is: Can the brain, being a macro-object, develop macroscopic quantum possibilities for consciousness to choose from?

The answers? The first is a question that materialists ask mostly as a decoy to quench your enthusiasm about the meaning of quantum physics. Of course it applies to your everyday life. Quantum physics is the physics of possibilities. As I pointed out in my very first book on the subject, The Self-Aware Universe, to use quantum physics in a paradox-free way scientists have to postulate an agent of causation that converts possibility into actuality (call it downward causation of conscious choice), and that agent has to be a Oneness (quantum physics and experimental data demands it) that splits into a subject and an object in a quantum measurement. In other words, the Oneness, the causal agent of downward causation, is what we call consciousness. This one discovery sets the ground for the integration of science and spirituality, no less. If spirituality is important to you, so is quantum neuroscience because it gives evidence of your spirituality.

The second question is well taken. Macro-objects at room temperature are known to be notoriously Newtonian, and the brain should not be an exception. There are some speculative theories about a quantum brain that the scientific materialist gleefully refutes.

In this book, we give a definitive explanation of how consciousness can connect with the brain even though the material brain is approximately Newtonian. It is via non-physical quantum organizing fields behind our feelings and thoughts that consciousness connects to the brain, in fact to all living beings. Our feelings and thoughts are quantum movements. Their quantum connections give the brain its non-Newtonian quantum features.

•Spiritual traditions and more recently transpersonal psychology posit that we have two modalities of the self that arise in connection with the brain. In my earlier work, I have developed the quantum science of the two-self modality —the quantum self and the ego. In this book, we will go through the whole thing again but in conjunction with the resolution of what cognitive neuroscientists call the paradox of perception. The new science is an integrative science: not only does it integrate science and spirituality, but also quantum physics and cognitive neuroscience. We will further show that neuroscience data has confirmed this idea of two selves, additionally giving us definitive data of a preconscious zone between the two modes that the theory predicts.

Why is this important to you? If you go to any advice guru, be it a spiritual teacher or a transpersonal psychologist, and talk about transformation, she will say, Meditate. The concept of two selves with the bridge of preconscious between them explains many of our meditative spiritual experiences establishing the scientific validity of the efficacy of meditation to produce expansive states of consciousness. The brains of most people are conditioned to be constricted during most of their waking hours. Meditation is meant to train the brain to stay conducive to expansion of consciousness.

•Besides being a vehicle for consciousness to express itself as a subject or self, the brain is also known for its ability to make representations of the mind or mental thoughts that we call memory. There are many unexplained facts about memory, for example, memory retrieval; all these facts are explained in this book. We also explain the origin of our mecenteredness and personality.

If you are interested in transformation, you already are aware that one of the things you want to change is your excessive mecenteredness and inauthentic personalities you carry that keeps you from engaging in genuine relationships. The knowledge generated here is crucial for your effort.

•Our brain has negative emotional brain circuits accounting for much of the emotional turmoil that we create and suffer from. Evolutionary biologists tell us that they came from animal instincts, but give us no real theory. We will give you a complete theory and explanation.

Obviously, a theory of these negative emotional brain circuits will help you to look for and appreciate and explore the remedy when you see it in this book.

•We discuss the subject of pleasure and pleasure-centeredness and explain the differences between the experience of pleasure and that of happiness and how pleasure need not be negated, how pleasure can be used to enhance happiness.

You know, traditional spirituality is rather negative on pleasure. Surely setting a scientific perspective will help you to find a proper place for both pleasure and happiness in your life. In other words, quantum science tells us pleasure with moderation is not only okay but also necessary.

•We present data in support of the idea of reincarnation which is revolutionizing our concepts of the psychology of transformation.

The brain data will remove any doubts you harbor about the scientific validity of reincarnation. This will facilitate your exploration of meaning and purpose.

•A recent famous discovery of neuroscience is neuroplasticity; brain can change and we can affect its change. In this book, we will discuss how you can rewire your brain to improve the quality of your life using quantum principles of transformation. The Scottish actor Brian Cox expressed a widespread concern when he said in a recent interview, The human condition essentially is quite a tragic condition.Literally, quantum science will show you the way out of this base level tragic human condition (me-centeredness, propensity for emotional negativity, pleasure-centeredness, information addiction) to higher levels of happiness.

This undoubtedly is the most important thing about the brain that you are looking for, ever since you became interested in transformation, be it for healing from addiction, be it for improving relationships, be it for positive mental health, be it for achieving abundance, including material abundance, be it for spiritual transformation. There are several brain books written on the subject, but frankly they are all compromised because they adhere to material monism.

•Using ideas of quantum creativity, and applying those ideas to the purely quantum energies (vital energy) that we feel, quantum science shows you how