Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

Not in Our Name If one takes the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics to the letter, in the beginning there were only probabilities. There was no observer to "collapse" the wave functions of whatever existed, therefore there were only evolving wave functions: probabilities. There was, technically speaking, no reality to talk about, because there was no observer to cause it to collapse to the state of reality. Human reality depends on humans to exist and to observe it. Then at some point, out of this giant network of probabilities a conscious observer was created. That conscious observer was not a probability: it was a reality. That conscious observer (the human race) is making the entire universe metamorphose from probabilities into reality. In this story there seems to be something missing: how do probabilities create a conscious observer? How does a state of probabilities evolve into a state of conscious observers? Was the conscious observer merely a probability from the beginning, that turned out to exist out of sheer luck, or was it meant to exist from the beginning? Is everything that can possibly exist eventually going to exist, given enough time, given enough trials and errors? Is today's conscious observer still only a probability herself, and not an actual "reality"? Relativity tells a different story, a story of pure determinism: our future is determined by the past. If Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are both true (despite the fact that we are not capable of explaining one with the other), then the emergence of the observer must have been written in the original conditions, in the original set of probabilities. The story of the universe may be the story of an entity that is slowly transforming itself from one kind of substance to another kind of substance, and consciousness might be just the tool that it is employing in order to achieve that transition.   Back to the beginning of the chapter "The New Physics" | Back to the index of all chapters