The Universal Consciousness Hypothesis
To understand this idea, let’s go back to that traffic jam, jam packed with qualia. The more qualia contained in that observer moment, the rarer we can expect identical observer moments in the multiverse to be. Let’s walk through this to see what I mean.
Imagine you are in the traffic jam and you close your eyes. All the sensory input (qualia) from your field of vision is now missing from this new moment. Anyone hearing, feeling, thinking, etc. the same things you are — without any visual qualia — anywhere in the multiverse, is now indistinguishable from you and you from them. You are like the same frame in the movie on the DVD of all existence.
Now turn off the radio. Shut off the engine. Undo your seatbelt. One by one you remove qualia, and the resulting observer moment becomes less and less rare because there is less and less to distinguish it from other observer moments. Conversely, if more unique qualia were to be added, such as getting into a car accident, the new observer moment would be rarer. If the multiverse isn’t truly infinite and just ridiculously huge, a moment like our traffic jam might even be unique.
One way to think of this is, as qualia are removed, there are more and more past moments that could seamlessly merge into this one. And there are more that could come after, each one with different qualia added back in. When you turn the radio back on, the sound it makes will be one from every possible observer moment that fits with the one you were just having. Of course your memory of the radio from before you turned it off will match what you hear in the new observer moment. There will still be continuity because you have memories from many prior observer moments, but for a moment, the set of all observer moments you were a part of was enlarged.
What would happen if we kept removing qualia? What would there be if there were none left? Would we still be conscious? It turns out that people have been training their minds to be free of every kind of mental object for thousands of years. We call them Buddhist monks, and they have some very interesting things to say about empty observer moments.
John Yates is a neuroscientist who has been practicing and teaching meditation for more than 40 years. In his book, “The Mind Illuminated,” he tells us that an untrained mind is constantly jumping from one thing to another, never paying attention to one specific thing for more than a few moments. As soon as interest wanes — even a little — our minds supply us with a new object of attention from our peripheral awareness or from our unconscious.
During meditation, the practitioner sits still and focuses on the sensations of her breath. We live with these breath sensations our whole lives, and rarely do they hold any important for our conscious minds. They are about as boring and neutral as can be. So the mind (sometimes immediately) directs attention elsewhere. The practice of meditation is to redirect attention back to the breath over and over with the intention of sustaining attention there.
With enough deliberate and diligent practice, it is possible to train your mind to pay exclusive attention to a single object (such as breath sensations) for as long as you wish. It is difficult to describe the experience because it is so different from everyday states of consciousness, where our minds are constantly looking around for input to integrate into the ongoing narrative of our lives.
As one gets better at meditation, thoughts, feelings and sensations (qualia) that used to powerfully capture attention fail to do so and remain in peripheral awareness. Ignored long enough, they eventually recede from conscious awareness altogether. It is particularly odd when primary senses that have been ever-present in one’s whole life disappear, such as hearing, vision and proprioception (a sense of your own body).
Another interesting experience common among advanced practitioners is when enough layers of qualia have disappeared that individual observer moments can be distinguished from one another. Instead of experiencing the illusion of change over time (as when we hit play on a DVD), the individual frames are experienced independently of one another. Losing the subjective experience of time is a radical departure from everyday perception and leads to an experience congruent with our “block universe” understanding of reality, where there is no unique dimension for time.
Eventually, one can train to the point where entering and maintaining this state is effortless, so even the qualia resulting from that effort disappears. Along this journey of self-discovery and self-mastery, superficial aspects of your consciousness and the diversity of qualia that capture your attention fade away. What is left could be called empty consciousness or pure consciousness.
According to our discussion above, such a state should be universal to all empty conscious observer moments regardless of the particulars of their local physical surroundings.
It doesn’t matter if you are 6’2″, missing an arm or full of food if you are not aware of your body. It doesn’t matter if you speak Chinese or Greek if you are not thinking. And it doesn’t matter which universe you are in if there are no qualia to distinguish you from any other observer moment void of qualia in any other universe. In a sense, one in a state of this “universal consciousness” has merged with the largest possible set of observer moments, a universal set from which countless histories and futures branch off.
What would you guess this experience is like? You might think it is empty and dull because there is nothing there to experience, but it is not. Adept practitioners throughout the ages describe immense pleasure and joy, peace, serenity and deep, intuitive understanding. They describe experiencing a sense of oneness and interconnection. They describe insight into impermanence, emptiness, the nature of suffering and the illusion of the self as separate from the rest of existence. And they all describe the same thing, just as we would expect them to if our ideas are correct.
Not only is there a test for the universal consciousness hypothesis (and thus the multiverse and observer moment hypotheses), but it has been run over and over in a huge variety of conditions with consistent results. Every person on Earth can test it out for themselves if they wish, even you dear reader. All you have to do is sit and focus. If you are truly interested in or already walking this path, I highly recommend reading “The Mind Illuminated” to benefit from the knowledge and guidance of those who have gone before us.
For myself, I have been practicing daily for over four years. I am not an adept. There is a ways to go before I can sustain exclusive attention effortlessly, but I have gained some skill and occasionally glimpse the rarified states and insights I read about. What I have described is just an hypothesis that fits what we already know about consciousness and cosmology. There could very well be another explanation for the common experience of adept meditators. But then again, it might be true. At some point, our understanding of these subjects may advance to where we can make testable predictions and prove them wrong or right. Until then, it’s fun to believe we are not alone when we sit and focus and find a moment of serenity. I’ll see you on the path.
