Believing appearances are real,
you cannot see their Source.
-Xinxin Ming

A century ago, physics experienced a paradigm shift so worldview shattering, they don’t like talk about it. They discovered that matter has a substrate, and it’s mathematics! Mathematics is a language, which implies there is a consciousness behind the language. Shaken by the implications of their own work, the physics community became philosophically silent, but with a renewed interest in verification. Research on the fundamentals of physics became unfunded, and effectively taboo. By the 1950’s, a “shut up and calculate” policy had been established in universities across the West, effectively removing philosophy from physics. Why? Because all their experiments keep verifying that we’ve been living in a dream world. …Neo.

Position and velocity are what you can
observe. But until you measure them, they
don’t exist. Only the wave function does.
-Sean Carroll

Regarding the nature of existence (ontology), the scientific community remains sheltered by the legacy of materialism—the commonsense view of a physically deterministic universe existing independent of observation. Who would argue against that? Even Einstein’s general relativity needs matter in space to make gravity. But there’s a significant problem with this intuitive view. It’s been proven ontologically wrong by the last century of experimentation. All matter is actually wave functions. Wave functions are not physical waves, but mathematical functions like y=x+3. The structure of the universe is math on the outside, consciousness on the inside.

A wave function is just a mathematical record of the probability zone where a particle will emerge from the math if observed. Wave functions can shrink down to near the size of particles, which allows them behave essentially as particles (note in the above image how small the iron wave functions forming the corral are). When not observed, wave functions behave according to the strict determinism of mathematics, which appears to us as physical determinism. The quantum probability part we always hear about, only happens at observation. For the rest of the time, the universe evolves according to the mathematical precision of quantum determinism.

This has led to an insurmountable problem for the commonsense view of an objective world outside of observation. The problem is, there is no experimental evidence for objective collapse (of the wave function into particles of matter), and a century of evidence for subjective collapse—matter only becomes physical in observation. The weight of this evidence is summed up as the Measurement Problem. To deal with the problem, physicists altered the meaning of the word “observer” (from the Copenhagen interpretation) to include “measurement,” which doesn’t require an observer. That way, the environment can collapse its own wave functions, allowing for physical determinism to proceed without observation. This is conflating decoherence with collapse, but it lets us think of the Big Bang as an explosion of particles in expanding space, instead of a storm of wave functions in quantum fields. And we get to think of rocks as objectively physical, instead of tightly entangled groups of wave functions that only become physical in subjective experience…along with their history going back to the quantum storm of 13.8 billion BC. Crazy that. And that’s not all. Einstein’s Relativity sees spacetime as purely mathematical as well. So, space, time, mass, and energy are ultimately mathematical. All that’s left is consciousness? This is what a century of experimentation keeps telling our physicists. It is a quantum universe. There is no objective spacetime, or objectively physical objects.

We are participators in bringing into being
not only the near and here, but the
far away and long ago. –John Wheeler

For two-thousand years, Western science assumed God created heaven and earth. Then, for 200 years and ending 100 years ago, the evidence pointed toward the arguably nihilistic universe of materialism, when they discovered that the world is not the center of the universe, but one planet among billions, spinning like a top while getting dragged around by a star in a galaxy of the Virgo supercluster. But now, a new science has seen past all that, and is pointing back toward a universal consciousness. Modern experiments tell us our consciousness acts like a catalyst, localizing wave functions into our experience of the physical world from an otherwise nonlocal realm. Why would that be? The simplest explanation is, our consciousness is this nonlocal consciousness, just localized into a body; compartmentalized and disassociated from the rest of ourselves—like in a dream we are always looking out toward our mind & body, we rarely notice our nonlocal inner nature. Top physicists realized this a century ago. Before it became taboo, or despite the taboo in Planck and Wheeler’s case, this is how they talked about it:

The universe is of the nature of a thought or
sensation in a universal Mind…The stuff of the
world is mind-stuff. –Sir Arthur Eddington

As a man who has devoted his whole life
to the most clearheaded science, to the
study of matter, I can tell you as a
result of my research about the atoms
this much: There is no matter as such!
All matter originates and exists only
by virtue of a force…We must assume
behind this force the existence of a
conscious and intelligent Mind. This
Mind is the matrix of all matter.
–Max Planck

The universe does not exist “out there”,
independent of us. We are inescapably
involved in bringing about that which
appears to be happening…Today we
demand of physics some understanding
of existence itself. –John Wheeler

Is this loosening the grip your default worldview has on you? Then it’s good prep work for meditation.

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WHAT ARE WE?

We are consciousness. Our mind and body are earthly accumulations. Scientists found the building blocks of our accumulations to be a mathematical language in the form of quantum wave functions. That there is a mathematical language giving rise to reality tells us there is consciousness on the other side of wave functions as well. So, the source of the universe appears to be consciousness; what we are.

This explains why the universe is so mathematically oriented; why math works so well in the classical world. Pythagoreans were even saying it 2,600 years ago. Everywhere you look, the world is built on the fine structure of mathematics. A great example from our classical world is the Golden Ratio. Sometimes, the same formula can span the classic and the quantum. The famous Schrodinger equation of quantum mechanics is essentially a heat flow equation borrowed from classical physics. That’s nuts. It’s always been obvious, but modern physics confirmed the world itself is a mathematical construct. Needless to say, modern physicists don’t publish much on this subject:

…the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it. -Eugene Wigner | The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics (1960)

If you think quantum mechanics sounds more like a simulation than a dream, I agree. It behaves like a simulation as opposed to a model, but it’s still a dream, because we are real. For all we know, wave functions are brainwaves. The real question is, is the consciousness that’s behind the simulation another being, or consciousness itself? Each component in the simulation is governed by a model (a wave function), which describes its location and shape within the rules (Hamiltonian) of the simulated environment (Hilbert space), but our consciousness is certainly not part of the simulation. It’s for sure real. If it’s just a being like us behind the simulation, then there must be a real universe to house this being, and the simulation theory just inherited all the problems of materialism. And our consciousness must be piped into the simulation; us billions of humans, along with the countless lifeforms of earth (can’t all be NPCs) must be accounted for outside the simulation, and that gets messy.

That’s why simulation theorists tend to argue the simulation itself must generate our consciousness. But how can the simulated appearance of a brain make anything? Real brains can’t even make consciousness. Quantum mechanics tells us consciousness makes matter, not the other way around.

In contrast, the view that consciousness itself is behind the simulation, deals with the First Cause Argument, solves the Hard Problem of Consciousness, the Measurement Problem, explains all phenomena, has far fewer assumptions than all other alternatives, and is personally verifiable. If your consciousness is what’s most real, then maybe consciousness is what’s most real.

So, what are we? Our experience here on earth is a mix of Consciousness & Information—Will & Representation, Shiva & Shakti, Purusha & Prakriti, God & Creation. We are that.

Why isn’t this common knowledge? Because no scientist wants to defend such a position. It’s counterintuitive, abstract, anthropocentric, and sounds like religious wishful thinking. It’s far less controversial to suggest there must be some means of objective collapse, allowing the universe to physically unfold from the Big Bang. Too bad, really. Society could have used the good news.

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QUANTUM MECHANICS

Whatever exists, animate or inanimate, is born through the union of the field and its Knower.     -Bhagavad Gita

Matter (mass-energy) is a property of three quantum fields (up quark, down quark, electron) held together by two quantum fields (electromagnetic, strong nuclear). Physicists have no idea what causes these fields, but they can predict wave function behavior so astonishingly well with mathematics, the wave functions themselves are clearly mathematical. And in this sense, they are deterministic (again, the quantum probability part only has to do with observation). So, the deterministic nature of our world is not physical, but mathematical. When this was first published (1926) the author was concerned about how probabilities are mathematical, not physical. This problem has never been resolved.

It really is mathematical. The quantum rules describing the universe (the Hamiltonian) only make sense if you think of them operating within a mathematical space (Hilbert space). Mass is a property of quantum fields; not of wave functions or particles—the wave function only locates the particle in space, but the field it belongs to dictates the particles properties. So, what is a particle? The quantum realm is a variable-dimensional space (likely infinite dimensions), where imaginary numbers are real, and time doesn’t exist. Mass, charge, and spin magnitude are just numbers (constants) in formulas. A quantum field is a Hilbert space. The true state of the universe is a high-dimensional mathematical space. One example: The spin–orbit interaction parameter, must know and use the tensor-product structure of the Hilbert space in its formula—It’s behaving in ways that are clearly mathematical. The point is, science discovered the true structure of the universe, and it’s mathematical. Why would that be? 

The fact that you cannot separate the original matter from the deeper reality tells you this is a monism. – Federico Faggin

Physicists still like to say you don’t need an observer, just a measuring device to collapse the wave function into a particle. I disagree. There is nothing intrinsically different from the sample and the measuring device; they are both matter. On its own, matter resides in quantum superposition, and if we were only matter, we would exist in superposition as well. But since we don’t, there clearly must be something intrinsically different about us (lifeforms), an extra-physical element, that causes physicality. The obvious difference is, we are conscious. Why all the confusion about this?

A measurement without an observer is just decoherence of the superposition, and not collapse of the wave function. Decoherence and collapse can appear to be the same from our perspective, in that a measuring device can measure a mathematically precise outcome while still in superposition, but one is physically in spacetime and the other is not. It’s more correct to think of the objects in the universe as fields of structured quantum probabilities, rather than a collection of particles. Only the observed parts reduce to particles.

Classical systems have localized wave functions that approximately obey classical equations. -Sean Carroll on the Ehrenfest theorem

What does the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle tells us? It’s another proof that particles are a mathematical illusion. When observed, wave functions collapse into aspects of particles only; never complete particles. If you could know a particles exact velocity, it’s position would be a flat distribution across the universe—everywhere and nowhere. It’s confirmation that everything is wave functions, and particles are what happens when we interact with them.

What did we learn from the double-slit experiments? They conclusively demonstrate how light and matter operate in Hilbert space (a mathematical realm) until they are observed—proof that physical objects only exist in the experience of it. If you try to view the delayed-choice experiment from a classical spacetime perspective, it generates the paradox of retrocausality, telling us it’s an incorrect perspective. The results only makes sense if you think of light “moving” through the apparatus as a wave function, not yet in time or space. Likewise, sunlight in your room does not propagate through your room, but as information in Hilbert space. Matter rests in Hilbert space too. It only transitions into spacetime in the experience of it. The double-slit experiments prove the world is an illusion (māyā).

We are mixed up about the word entanglement—how wave functions combine to make the classical-scale objects we experience. The quantum entanglement everyone talks about (SPDC entanglement) is when a single wave function is split into two particles, allowing them to relate to each other at paradoxically faster than light speeds. But the far more common version of entanglement is when different wave functions interact with each other to make all the classical-scale physical objects we know and love—like ripples on a pond interacting to make more complex patterns. They call this form of entanglement, decoherence, and it’s how unobserved history develops deterministically while remaining in superposition (not physically in spacetime).

Quantum applies to all scales. The very reason why scientists were looking into quantum scales was to see what matter is made of. In that endeavor, they were successful. But what they found was crazymaking. The building blocks of matter turned out to be an elegant mathematical language operating outside of spacetime. And that’s why they’d rather limit their quantum talk to the strange phenomena happening at quantum scales. But the Bell’s inequality experiments of the 1980’s strongly suggested, and now Leggett-Garg inequality experiments of the early 2000’s have confirmed, it’s a quantum universe at all scales. Quantum mechanics explains all classical scale phenomena. Magnets are an interesting example. The force we know as magnetism is caused by the spin of individual electrons in atoms and is in all matter, but it can bleed into classical scales when enough of the electron spins are set into alignment, as in magnetized iron. Magnetism is literally a quantum force bleeding into classical scales. But then, so are all the forces of nature. The way we think about quantum is all wrong. Classical physics is just a mathematical shortcut to model the behavior of large-scale quantum objects. At what size would we even make the break between quantum and classical? In certain conditions, matter can maintain quantum coherence and behave like a single wave function at classical scales. Typically, the more wave functions involved, the less likely they will all be waving coherently together (resulting in decoherence), but there are examples of large-scale coherent objects, such as lasers, superfluids, superconductivity, and Bose Einstein condensates.

To sum things up, mathematical information is currently thought to be the building blocks of all physical objects. Unobserved matter, and even its history, never physically exists, except as qualia in experience. The universe is math on the outside, and consciousness on the inside. What does that do to your worldview?

The rest of this segment just gets into greater detail. Here’s a quick YouTube describing the behind the scenes side of matter:

What Is a Field? – Instant Egghead #42 | YouTube 2:21

This next YouTube beautifully details how a single wave function collapses into particles as they are observed, and how the wave function progresses after collapse. However, be advised: They say the detector is collapsing the quantum states, but that is only decoherence, not collapse. In reality, the detector, as well as its detection history, remain in superposition until collapsed by observation (the Heisenberg chain breaks at observation). 

Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics) | YouTube 14:33

Science has long been wanting to tell us that beneath the surface, we are all one. Below is a Cambridge professor explaining how all the universe reduces to quantum fields (19 minutes into his Faraday’s Fields talk).

Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe – with David Tong | YouTube 1:00:17

So, these fields contain information, which collapse when observed by the “light” of consciousness. And any lifeform will do. This scientific conclusion was formalized as the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation of the Copenhagen interpretation (also see 2 minutes into Dean Radin’s talk).

For example, the moment before a photon registers in your awareness, its wave function (in Hilbert space) may span many light years in spacetime. It could have collapsed into the eye of a distant observer on another planet (hypothetically speaking), but the moment it collapsed into your eye, it instantly became unavailable to any other observer, and the entire history of its trajectory became a spacetime event. The only way this information could be conveyed across light years in an instant is if it wasn’t actually a thing in spacetime. Everything in the universe is like this. Before it is observed it is only information in Hilbert space, and not really a thing in the universe.

This quantum substrate has long been described by saints and sages (meditators). For example, the Bhagavad Gita devotes a chapter to quantum fields, and the Spanda Karika (sacred tremor) is a 9th century text about wave functions.

The sacred tremor,
the very place of creation and return,
is completely limitless because
its nature is formless.
-Spanda Karika

Returning is the motion of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
The ten thousand things are born of being.
Being is born of not being.
-Tao Te Ching

Without effort the [Self] encompasses both
the movable and the unchanging,
the manifest and the unmanifest.
-Avadhuta Gita

Universal Consciousness unfolds
the universe on its own screen…
[It] brings about all emanation
and reabsorption of the universe.
-Pratyabhijnahridayam

Though all the galaxies emerge from him,
he is without form and unconditioned.
-Tejobindu Upanishad

That which has form is not real.
Only the formless is permanent.
Once this is known, you will not
return to illusion.
-Ashtavakra Gita

O Seeker, form does not differ from emptiness…
All appearances are emptiness…
No mind, no fear.
The imagined world is seen through.
Nirvana.
-Heart Sutra

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THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY

To be is to be perceived.
–George Berkeley

The salient point of Einstein’s theory of relativity is that spacetime only exists relative to observers—that there is no objective universe out there. This is not how the scientific community interprets it. They would say the relativity part only applies to our perception of spacetime, not to spacetime itself (it’s not ontic, but merely epistemic). I disagree, and side with physicist’s like John Wheeler. Essentially, the two postulates of special relativity say all the laws of physics are relative and conform to each observer. Why would that be?

The word “relativity” is just a science way of saying “subjectivity,” since the relative means relative to observers. Relative vs absolute translates to subjective vs objective. So, if all the laws of physics are subjective, then none of the laws are objective. A universe is governed by its laws. If there are no objective laws, there can’t be an objective universe.

If there’s no objective universe, then there is no objective causality, and Einstein came up with thought experiments to prove it. He noted, if spacetime always renders properly for every observer, paradoxes should occur in objective reality, proving it doesn’t really exist. This is explained to us in the form of Einstein’s thought experiments, but what is always left out is the main point: If they are correct, our common sense notion of an objective, physical spacetime must be wrong. We now know them to be correct.

Relativity was published before quantum mechanics, so it uses a classical framework. But we now know that framework is a mere approximation of the actual underlying quantum processes. Spacetime is warped by gravity, and gravity is caused by matter, but matter is entangled wave functions, so spacetime is warped by entangled wave functions.

Einstein’s fabric of spacetime is the veil of Maya. And since this was such an outrageous claim for any scientist to argue, Einstein spent the rest of his long career trying to refute it. In fact, he tried so hard to falsify relativity, he altered the scientific method.

Perhaps the closest Einstein ever got to formally discussing the ontological implications of relativity was in his last publication on space, an introduction to the book, The Concepts of Space, by a close colleague of his, Max Jammer, where Einstein explains Jammer’s view on the nature of space:

…the whole of physical reality could
perhaps be represented as a field…
the introduction of an independent
(absolute) space is no longer necessary.
That which constitutes the spatial
character of reality is then simply
the four-dimensionality of the field.
-Albert Einstein

In the book, Jammer describes Einstein as having this same view, though in a more scientific language (see example on p. 172-173).

Einstein’s relativity demonstrates how the laws of physics conform to our personal continuum of causal reality; that there is no objective universe out there. This ancient Buddhist quote most eloquently describes the implications of Einstein’s relativity:

What appears as a world of
apparently external phenomena, is
the play of energy of sentient beings.
There is nothing external or separate
from the individual. Everything that
manifests in the individual’s field
of experience is a continuum.
-Pratītyasamutpāda

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CONCLUSION

Science went tumbling down the rabbit hole with relativity and quantum mechanics, back in the early 1900’s. They literally found a paradoxical realm beneath space and time. Paradoxes that can be resolved only by abandoning their core belief in the idea of an objectively physical universe. Einstein’s relativity of simultaneity paradox tipped the philosophical needle back toward ontological idealism 120 years ago. But such an extraordinary shift in worldview required extraordinary evidence, so science set out to verify. Now it’s 120 years later, and they never found any evidence to refute it. All they’ve managed to do is accumulate a centuries worth of extraordinary evidence in support of it. Maybe it’s time we give up on the nihilistic worldview of the 1700’s, and accept the uplifting new science of the 1900’s. Here’s my argument.

Premises:

• We can be absolutely certain about conscious, but nothing else.
• Something can’t come from nothing.
• Consciousness is more fundamental than mass, energy, space, & time.

Conclusion:

• Consciousness creates the universe.

Why is there something, and not nothing? All life is the result of a singular consciousness localizing into organisms in a universe of its own creation. We are this consciousness, temporarily masquerading as humans …so, love your neighbor as yourself, because they are.