Consciousness, cells, and wave collapse as faith outcomes.

Earlier today I was thinking about the links and relationship of quantum physics and the macro-world. According to Dr. Goswami, there are three aspects of quantum that do not work well in the macro world of Newtonian physics: discontinuity, non-locality, and tangled hierarchy. The idea of tangled hierarchy is the most difficult to conceptualize and still develop some meaningful examples for non-physicists like myself.

As I understand the tangled hierarchy concept, there is no distinction between subject and object. This is exemplified in the observation (and requirement?) that there must be an observer present to collapse the possibility wave into material phenomena. A tremendous amount of research exists to support this concept and the observations which generate the data appear consistently from experiment to experiment. This much is relatively clear for me and I think I “get it” when it comes to the big picture.

As challenges go my most difficult to understand is how the set of possibilities collapse to form the universe we live in. If there is a relationship between the quantum aspects of our universe and the macro-world which is built on the foundation of the quantum materials then what or when or how or whatever happened to collapse the universe into what we know today? How could the possibilities collapse without someone to cause the collapse while the observer could not exist until after the collapse occurred? How could the universe collapse without having an observer present to cause the collapse? So no matter what happens there is an antecedent occurrence which makes the outcome possible, but the antecedent is a consequence of the prior event so it is always a matter of a never ending hierarchy just like the chicken and egg problem.

Dr. Goswami explains as best I understand it, that the observer is the first complex cell that developed and had a consciousness. This part that a cell had consciousness, is not difficult to understand given the work of Dr. Bruce Lipton and his research on cell membranes and consciousness. They fit together well. However, I’m hung up in between the collapsing of the possibilities and the creation of the cell. Still this is where consciousness as the underlying structure of the universe began to make itself felt. So when the cell developed and stabilized it was possible for consciousness to impact the universe in a material form into specific outcomes. This caused the infinite number of possibilities to manifest as a single form that we have as the universe today.

We know, according to this model, that consciousness is the underlying and causal property of the universe. Evidence, anecdotal and inferential, indicates consciousness has not stopped interacting with the consciousness that we bring to the events of our lives. Consequently, our activity in describing a limited number of the infinite potential outcomes represents faith which drives the collapse of the possibilities. To describe specific results amidst the vast number of potential outcomes is the expression of having faith that someone can change his or her world in a particular direction.

Each of our religions attempts to help us get to the point that we can exercise faith and describe a limited outcome to the future events. Ideally if we all worked together we could collapse the possibility waves into one where peace and love are the outcomes. The challenge for us is to not specify how that outcome has to happen – just that it will happen.