Is Consciousness the Ground of Being of Reality?
For anyone who has looked into it with an open mind, there can be little doubt that consciousness is the ground of being of the physical universe. Why then do many, if not most scientists think otherwise? They do so because they erroneously believe the brain creates consciousness, and therefore, consciousness simply did not exist until evolution produced a brain.
The book pictured at left explains why the opposite is true. Consciousness produced the brain, not the other way around.
How did modern science get off track? Beginning with the Darwinians, science began exploring the idea that the physical brain might be the source of thoughts and consciousness. Ironically, as one group of scientists attempted to explain consciousness in terms of Newtonian physics, scientists in a different discipline, physics, were forced to move away from Newtonian physics and develop quantum mechanics in order to explain phenomena in which consciousness—what a researcher knows or doesn’t know—completely changes the results of certain experiments. It is as though the right hand did not know what the left hand was up to, and incredibly, this remains how things are today. Today’s blog will explain one of those experiments so that you can decide for yourself what is true.
It’s called the “Double Slit Experiment,” and the strange but revealing phenomenon associated with it, “The Participating Observer.” The findings of this experiment are straightforward, and grasping their implication of prime importance to understanding the true nature of the reality in which we live.
Scientists have known for more than a hundred years that light can behave both as waves and as particles (photons), but until 1905 they thought it was comprised only of waves. Thomas Young (1773-1829) demonstrated in 1803 that light is waves by placing a screen with two parallel slits between a source of light—sunlight coming through a hole in a screen—and a wall. Each slit could be covered with a piece of cloth. These slits were razor thin, not as wide as the wavelength of the light. When waves of any kind pass through an opening not as wide as they are, the waves diffract. This was the case with one slit open. A fuzzy circle of light appeared on the wall.
When both slits were uncovered, alternating bands of light and darkness appeared, the center band being the brightest. Scientists call this a zebra pattern. The areas of light and dark resulted from what is known in wave mechanics as interference. Waves overlap and reinforce each other in some places and in others they cancel each other out. The bands of light on the wall indicated where one wave crest overlapped another crest. The dark areas showed where a crest and a trough met and canceled each other out.
In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper that revealed light also behaves as if it consists of particles. He did so by using the photoelectric effect. When light hits the surface of a metal, it jars electrons loose from the atoms in the metal and sends them flying off as though struck by tiny billiard balls. So, Thomas Young demonstrated light is waves, and Einstein demonstrated it is particles.
Now let’s consider a double slit experiment constructed to determine what happens when those conducting the experiment observe or do not observe which slits the photons of light pass through. In this experiment, a gun is used that fires one photon at a time. Both slits are open and a detector is used to determine which slit a photon passes through. A record is made of where each one hit. Only one photon at a time was shot, so one would suppose there could be no interference. This was the case. The photons did not make a zebra pattern. Rather, they made marks, tiny dots, on a screen.
When the detector is turned off, however, and it is not known which slit a photon passes through, the zebra pattern appears. In other words, without the detector turned on, the particles behave like waves even though they are fired one at a time. Imagine the stir this caused among those conducting the experiment. Back in the day, Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman was quoted as saying this is the “central mystery” quantum mechanics, that something as intangible as knowledge—in this case, which slit a photon went through—changes something as concrete as a pattern on a screen.
But how could knowledge change the behavior of particles shot from a gun? Conventional science
cannot produce an explanation because a tenet of conventional science is that the brain produces consciousness, awareness, and thought, and that means consciousness, awareness, and thought are confined within a person’s skull. Since it would be ludicrous to suggest that thought enclosed inside a person’s head could be capable of having an effect on photons shot from a gun, it ought to be clear to everyone the tenet must be false.
The fact of the matter is that consciousness is the ground of being of physical reality and everything and everyone, including you and me, arose from it. A book entitled ANSWERS: Why You're Here, How It Happened, What to Do About It, published by The Oaklea Press explains the facts and the logic behind this assertion.
