Science Has Come Back
To Asking The Biggest Questions

By Bill Harvey, Director, The Human Effectiveness Institute

Let’s say you and I are having a conversation about the meaning of life. We agree that it all comes down to the question of what kind of universe are we living in. If we could know the answer to that then we can decide how to live.

Then let’s say that our intuitions disagree about what kind of universe we are living in. Your intuition says to stick to what you can see, which is a world of matter all around you. You prefer to believe that all that exists is matter and that while that does not exclude the possibility of God, you tend to think that whatever power exists might not be much like us.

On the other hand my intuition – and something more than that – makes me suspect that the world is quite different than that – and that the way the world really IS would end all wars once people realized the truth.

You want me to explain that really quickly without ‘a long drawn-out diatribe’. I can do that. It requires me to break it down into two steps. Fredkin and Fredkin2.

1. Fredkin

This really smart scientist (http://www.digitalphilosophy.org) named Ed Fredkin has a theory. Basically it says that besides matter there is also information. Information does not take up spacetime nor has it mass. Yet it is real. He then establishes that what we call the Soul exists not as matter but as information. He hypothesizes that some or possibly all of Soul can be stored and transmitted via DNA and by future scientific means.

Fredkin therefore gives information scientific reality. He establishes that information exists the same way matter, energy, and spacetime do, but not in the same dimension. Therefore since it is real, information can also therefore be stored and passed on. If the Soul is information then it too can be stored and passed on.

In Fredkin’s model, the Soul can be reincarnated but only once science works out a way to do it. And he is sure that in time it will be solved, since the proposition is perfectly straightforward. The information is there somewhere therefore in time we will find it and find a way to capture it and then “reincarnate it”.

In Fredkin’s synthesis, consciousness exists as a part of Q, the information content of the Soul at any defined time. He implies that consciousness too might be something that can be stored and then turned on again.

2. Fredkin2: What if Fredkin is onto something, but hasn’t gone far enough?

The thing is, science wants us to stick with what we can prove, and yet, the only thing we can prove is that experiences are apprehended by our consciousness. We can never get beyond our consciousness since 100% of our contact with the world is through our consciousness. We therefore can know with utter 100% certainty that consciousness exists. But we can never be that certain that matter exists. Our consciousness could be presenting us with the exact same information with or without “matter” existing outside of our consciousness. And we can never get outside consciousness to see if matter is really there.

Therefore it is an abstraction when Fredkin visualizes the world from an imagined third party point of view, thinking and writing as if he is looking out on a big room, from a point in that room external to himself. Actually he like the rest of us are looking out from within our consciousness and seeing a representation of the information we are bringing in from the external world… seeing that, still within our consciousness… never able to actually get outside of consciousness. This is the way that science has always been forced to work and shall always be forced to work.

So what if Fredkin is even more right than he thinks? What if information is not only as real as matter, what if information is more real than matter? The matter could be the representational coding of the information, rather than vice versa. So what are we left with:

1. Information is real and consciousness exists as a subset of information.

2. Matter may or may not be real, while consciousness is definitely real.

It is easier to imagine how matter arises from consciousness than vice versa. If consciousness came first, then matter could arise as 3-D television with additional types of “seeing” that are registered in the tactile, olfactory, and gustatory domains of consciousness. If matter came first, then it is hard to imagine how unconscious matter ever gave rise to the ineffable, nearly unspeakable experience we all share, of looking out as a ‘self’ from the inside of a thinking sensorium, at what appears, because it does not automatically follow our will, to be an external world. It is again hard to imagine how in a billion years we could ever build a self-aware machine. Faster computations alone will not logically lead to such an emergent property.

If consciousness is the most basic stuff of the universe, then what are the implications of that?

© 2002, The Human Effectiveness Institute

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