Questions and purposes: Cook excerpt #5

Nick Cook writes: My informal research to this point had furnished me with the following observations and questions: 

 

*Science doesn’t know what consciousness is – nobody knows.

*Science and philosophical enquiry give us two schools of thought: consciousness – our experience of ‘mind’ - is either generated within us, i.e. via electrochemical reactions in our brains and central nervous systems, or is external to us: our brains acting like ‘transmitter/receivers’, exchanging data much as a computer does with ‘the cloud’.

*This gives rise to a further complication: is consciousness the fundamental, underlying ‘substrate of reality’ or is the material world of objects ... things?

*The trouble here is that the ‘science of reality’ is defined, in so far as it can be, by two incompatible strands of physics: the way the universe works ‘at scale’ – as stated by classical physics and Einstein’s general relativity - and quantum mechanics: its workings at the sub-atomic level. There is no ‘theory of everything’ to marry the two, leaving sizeable holes in our scientific knowledge.

*The dark energy/matter conundrum was a case in point – both dark energy and dark matter are, in effect, postulated artificial components – some have gone so far as to refer to them as ‘fudges’ - with properties that permit mainstream science to explain deviations from standard predictions. These properties do not alter the fact: we can account only for five per cent of the stuff of the universe; the rest is an abject mystery.

*With the precedent, to corrupt Wheeler, that the study of anomalies gives rise to breakthroughs in new paradigms of understanding, what would it take, I wanted my research to examine, for mainstream science to be comfortable with the study of the paranormal, whose phenomena might hold clues to breakthroughs in this impasse – as well as in many other areas – that has so successfully impeded much-needed scientific progress in the past several decades?

Here, by corollary, was what I wanted my small research programme to accomplish:

*To present the paranormal as ‘science that is not yet understood’ to facilitate a needed discussion between scientists, parapsychologists and related researchers on the true nature of reality.

*To explore consciousness as it relates to the above – what it is or might be: a, or perhaps the missing link in the formulation of a grand unified theory of physics (and, de facto, reality), linking the macro world of classical science and general relativity with the micro world of quantum mechanics.

*To determine whether there are ‘shortcuts’ to individual experiences of the ‘deeper reality’ gained through ‘experiencer data’ – the kind of subjective evidence that would normally be thrown out ‘pre-trial’, so to speak, before a ‘scientific court of law’.

*To allow silo’d scientists to talk to each other on the subject of consciousness and paranormal/esoteric phenomena using a ‘lingua franca’ understandable to outsiders and acceptable to science.

*To set the framework for a cross-disciplinary approach to our understanding of the above by – in the future - bringing scientists and experiencers together in an ‘intellectually safe’ environment, in which sensible opinions, no matter what, would be respected; this for the purpose of exploring common threads of understanding regarding the true nature of reality.

My lack of formal knowledge would be both a hindrance and a help. On the deficit side, I was entering an unknown field from a near-standing start.

But I was also coming to the subject with few, if any, preconceived notions about what was and wasn’t permitted discussion, which might, conceivably, be an advantage.

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.