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Wednesday, August 28th, 2024

NOBEL PRIZE PHYSICIST THINKS CONSCIOUSNESS MUST UNDERLIE UNIVERSE

Author:     DENYSE O'LEARY
Source:     Mind Matters
Publication Date:     AUGUST 24, 2024
Link: NOBEL PRIZE PHYSICIST THINKS CONSCIOUSNESS MUST UNDERLIE UNIVERSE
Stephan:  

Brian Josephson is a colleague in consciousness research I have known for something like 40 years. Like many in physics he is struggling with making consciousness foundational and causal in physics but is getting there. I publish this to make the point that physicists including Nobel laureates are beginning to recognize that the current physicalist science paradigm is not wrong it is simply inadequate. This is a process that has been going on for almost a century. Planck, Einstein, Pauli, Heisenberg and other of the olympians who created modern physics began their careers as physicalists, but came to recognize as Planck said in 1931, the consciousness is causal and fundamental and that spacetime arises from consciousness, not consciousness from spacetime. It is a radical change but essential to understand the Matrix of Consciousness.

At Closer to Truth, Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviewed Welsh physicist Brian Josephson on the topic, “Must the Universe Contain Consciousness?” (June 12, 2024, 8:39 min). Josephson won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1973 for predicting the Josephson effect.

He sees consciousness as an aspect of the universe that we can’t ignore, even as he is not sure what to make of it:

Our universe seems fine-tuned for life, with the constants of physical laws having to be within tight boundaries. Does this mean that the universe has a goal of consciousness? Is there a directedness of the universe toward consciousness? Is consciousness entirely contingent or is it something special, even a ultimate object of universal development?

Here are a couple of selections prepared from the auto transcript at YouTube:

Kuhn asks how consciousness can underlie the universe, given that the universe has been around for billions of years but conscious life on Earth got started “just in the last few million years, even if you talk about animal consciousness.”

Josephson: But that [2:58] doesn’t tell us how universe begins. There lots of problems there. So therefore I propose that something happening beyond the universe and on a larger and possibly infinite time scale has this organization and is […]

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