The Cradle of Consciousness

The Cradle of Consciousness

I have a vision of the Songlines stretching across
the continents and ages; that wherever men have trodden
they have left a trail of song; and that these trails must reach back,
in time and space, to an isolated pocket in the African savannah,
where the First Man shouted the opening stanza to the World Song,
“I am!”
Bruce Chatwin – The Songlines

And that song still resounds. Here on Earth and throughout the Universe.

I Am!

Consciousness implies awareness, subjectivity, phenomenal experience of the inner and outer world. Consciousness implies a sense of ‘self’, of feeling, it implies conscious choice and, if we close our eyes, Consciousness allows us to construct a world of amazing inner images. But what Consciousness is to science remains a wonderful mystery. In an attempt to unravel the underlying mechanisms of Nature, modern Physics has developed theories to begin to answer the question of the origin of Consciousness. As is increasingly the case nowadays, one branch of knowledge alone is not sufficient to investigate such profound and essential topics. Physics therefore needs to establish a dialogue with other areas of knowledge, such as cellular microbiology, cultural anthropology, etc. The so called ‘hard’ sciences (such as Mathematics and Physics) meet the humanities as it has always been the case in antiquity and as it must still be today. It is therefore normal that an anaesthesiologist (who knows a lot about the suspension and restoration of the waking state of Consciousness) has some very interesting theories and talks about these ideas with one of the most enlightened living physicists of our times, and from this unusual dialogue an extraordinary theory on the origin of Consciousness is born, which includes Quantum Mechanics, the micro-cellular structure of the brain and the structure of the entire Universe. It is this theory that we will discuss here, but also something more that broadens and enriches the context and vision in which this theory was born.

The sky is crystal clear and the night is dark and starry. That same human being, the first [1], who began the song and dance of humanity, raised his eyes to the heavens and, overcome with emotion, took that primordial beauty into himself, beginning a pas de deux, a dance in that relational interweaving between the Cosmic Spirit and the Form of matter.

I am!

Here this relationship becomes Consciousness and that human being among the stars in the sky sees figures and creates myths inspired by a higher Consciousness. The extraordinary peculiarity is that all human beings who have looked at those luminous dots in the heavens have created the same myths in every part of the Earth; although with different names and different interpreters, the mythology inspired by this “Higher Consciousness” is always the same even among peoples who have never come into contact with each other [2].

The ages pass and mankind continues to sing and dance, and some of these songs we begin to call “science”, and bolstered by these melodies, our innate urge to know grows ever stronger, and with a great leap we arrive in the 1980s in a place laden with myths and legends. We are in fact in England, in the county of Nottingham, where a biologist called Rupert Sheldrake has an enlightening insight. Studying the natural processes involved in living beings, he asks himself: “What if memory instead of being an exclusively biochemical mechanism of the brain was something that is characteristic of the whole of Nature?”

Just as Physics has already realised that Space and Time are aspects of the gravitational field, so Sheldrake wonders whether memory might not be an aspect, an extended feature, of Nature.

The hypothesis is fascinating and on this he begins to build a theory that was extremely divisive in the scientific field at the time; back then, it was extremely difficult to push through ideas that did not adhere through and through to the “mainstream” of science.

In short, Sheldrake’s theory, which is known as “Morphic Resonance”, sees the brain as more of a radio receiver than a recorder of events.

Memories are not stored in the brain: it is the brain that “tunes in” to them. According to Sheldrake, memory traces in the brain are elusive and difficult to identify simply because they are not there.

For instance, according to the theory of morphic resonance, when someone learns something new, then many other people learn the same thing more and more easily. Morphic resonance does not only apply to living beings according to Sheldrake: for example, when a new crystal of a chemical substance manifests for the first time in nature and is replicated over and over again, it will tend to form more and more easily anywhere on the planet. This is because, again according to Sheldrake, the nature of things depends on a field he called the “Morphic Field”.

This field, like those studied in Physics, is a region of influence that expands in Space and Time. The field is located near and within the systems that the field itself “organises”. When one of these systems ceases to exist, as for example when a snowflake melts or an animal dies, its organising field disappears from that particular portion of spacetime, but in a sense, the morphic field does not disappear everywhere: this is in fact a pattern of influence that can reappear again and spontaneously in another place and time (not necessarily in the future, but we will not deal with that here) when the physical conditions are appropriate. When this happens, the new morphic field will contain within itself the Memory of its past physical existence.

The process through which we find information from the past within the new morphic field is called “Morphic Resonance” [3]. Morphic resonance conveys the transmission of information through both Space and Time. Memory within the resonance field is cumulative, which is why things prove incrementally easier with repetition. It is clear why such a theory aroused a great deal of mistrust in orthodox scientific circles in the eighties, and still does if not integrated into broader and more scientifically sound theoretical frameworks. The idea of a shared Memory, of an extended mind, that unites all things, animate and otherwise, in the Universe is fascinating, but it needs a solid conceptual basis for it to be taken up by a wide audience of researchers.

To build this basis, let us go back to the beginning to that chat between the anaesthetist and the physicist. We are still in England and it is still the late 1980s, but we move from Nottingham to Oxford. Here Roger Penrose, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics (at that time he did not yet know that he would be awarded this honour) is visited by an American from Buffalo, an anaes-thetist who teaches at the Uni-versity of Arizona and conducts research on suspended states of consciousness. This American’s name is Stuart Hameroff and he has an idea in his head; in order to verify it he needs to talk to a physicist who is open-minded enough not to immediately reject something unorthodox. That is why he chose Penrose, the one who set out to study black holes when no one believed in their existence (he was awarded the Nobel Prize precisely for these studies that he carried out with his student and collaborator Stephen Hawking).

The idea behind this unusual collaboration is that there is a connection between the biomolecular processes of the brain and the structure of the Universe. Neuroscience and Physics meet and in the early nineties, under the signature of Hameroff-Penrose, an article [4] is published that would cause a stir (and again, scepticism). In this article they postulate a theory on the origin of Consciousness, a partially extended and universal Consciousness, but contrary to what Sheldrake had done, well-established scientific notions are used here. The article is therefore very technical and not accessible by everyone; it relies on the basis of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity on the one hand, and on the cellular microbiology of the brain on the other.

Let us see what he says, first using somewhat difficult lan-guage (it is not necessary to understand it to grasp the basic concept) and then going simply to the essence of the Hameroff-Penrose thesis. The idea is that Consciousness depends on coherent quantum processes maintained by bio-logical “orchestration”. These “orchestrated” processes would originate within a collection of particular intracellular structures in the neurons of the brain, protein structures called “microtubules”. Within these microtubules these quantum processes correlate and regulate the synaptic activity of neurons and the “membranous” cellular activity. The continuous evolution of these processes according to the Schrödinger wave equation ends in accordance with the specific (Diósi-Penrose [5]) scheme of “Objective Reduction [6]” of the quantum state. This continuous orchestrated collapse activity of the wave function (Orchestrated Objective Reduction, abbreviated as Orch OR which gives its name to the Hameroff-Penrose thesis) is theorised to be at the origin of the moments of what we call Consciousness forming awareness.

As we said before all this is very difficult to grasp, but what is important to understand is that here the origin of Consciousness is connected to the relationship between the geometry of the Universe that determines the decoherence of quantum processes and the microcellular structure of the brain. Better yet, according to Hameroff-Penrose Consciousness arises from the relationship between the geometric structure of the Universe and the microcellular structure of the brain. As with Sheldrake, we have a collective scenario that lies at the origin of Consciousness. Hameroff-Penrose, according to their theory, in other words, hypothesise that at the origin of Consciousness there are discrete physical impulses or “events”; such entities are continuously present in the Universe as “proto-conscious” events (see footnote 4); these act as part of and in accordance with precise laws of Physics that are not yet fully understood. In all of this, Biology has arranged, through evolution, a mechanism for tuning and orchestrating these events and relating them to neuronal activity, and this relationship appears to be what underlies the moments of awareness and Consciousness.

In addition to Sheldrake’s extended mind here we also recognise the seeds of what Jung called the “Collective Unconscious”. Again, everything tells us that at the essence of Consciousness there is a relationship; a relationship between more “energetic, spiritual” entities and more “material, formal” ones.

I am!

The primordial song continues to vibrate in our Consciousnesses. We continue to lift our eyes to the sky and to be invaded by that same beauty that marvelled that first human being. We continue to dance and tell stories, sharing among all of us the Memory and Consciousness of the entire Universe. In that African savannah something was born and continues to develop today.

I am!

Consciousness implies awareness and when we accumulate sufficient awareness we will become a cradle for a higher Consciousness of unimaginable astonishment.

Everything is wonder.

 

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[1] The concept of first man is presented by esoteric Philosophy as Manu, and the root-Manu is the initiator of one of the seven Races or Cycles of manifestation of Being and planetary Consciousness, of which we are part: “Manu. The representative name of the great Being Who is the Ruler, primal progenitor and chief of the human race. It comes from the Sanskrit root “man”—to think.” (A. A. Bailey, Initiations, Human and Solar, p221)

[2] The magnificent adventure of mythology is recounted in the book ‘Hamlet’s Mill’ by de Santillana and von Dechend.

[3] Those who want to learn more about this very interesting topic can read Rupert Sheldrake’s book: “The Presence of the Past – Morphic Resonance and the Habit of Nature”, Icon Books, 1988

[4] The article under consideration is “Consciousness in the Universe. A review of the Orch OR theory” by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, ScienceDirect, 1990.

[5] Here things get very complicated indeed. According to the Diósi-Penrose model, the collapse of the wave function of a quantum state with its associated loss of coherence would be due to a gravitational effect. Thus, the geometry of space affects the coherence of a quantum system. For very technical in-depth analysis see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diósi–Penrose_model

[6] This is the same as saying “collapse of the wave function” or loss of quantum coherence.