The Central Enigma of Life, the Universe and Everything

How the brain gives rise to subjective consciousness remains the deepest and most confounding enigma in the scientific description of reality and our existential quest. The sentient universe is a fundamental complementarity between objective and subjective aspects, with our subjective consciousness and our physical world description forming our own intimate representation of this complementation. Although we depend on the physical world for our survival as an organism, all our experiences of it come exclusively through our subjective experience. This complementarity has a multi-fold manifestation in the world too - wave-particle, boson-fermion, ovum-sperm, female-male, etc. as the molecular fractal complexity of life explodes, and abstractly in chaos-order, calculus-algebra, discrete-continuous and defection vs cooperation in the prisoners' dilemma -- all forming a Tao, or Tantra, as the Eastern traditions describe it.

This means that even trying to think of the "hard problem" of consciousness research -- how the brain gives rise to the subjective mind -- as such, is a misrepresentation of a complementarity which can be understood only in terms of cosmological panpsychism. The scientific description of the physical universe, for all its astounding discoveries, is purely a model of the behaviour of physical entities, such as photons and molecules and the structures they form. This means we think of consciousness as associated only with the physical brain and with higher brain functions which we don't fully understand, but imagine can somehow bridge this gap in terms of collective neural oscillations. The trouble is that subjective experiences are so different from the physical description that no conceivable brain function model can bridge the gap.

By contrast, the Darwinian panpsychism of Symbiotic Existential Comology proposes that the fundamental constituents of the universe -- i.e. quanta -- have both a subjective existence and objective behaviour. We can't see this existence or "isness" directly, just as we have difficulty seeing one another's consciousness directly, so objective behaviour becomes the default core description. However we know that the quantum wave function shapes where each particle ends up in a way which remains unpredictable for a single quantum and only becomes determined in the average, in terms of the probability (amplitude squared) of the wave function. We have also discovered that quantum entanglement between particles is both critical and universal to how the universe works. This means that a primitive form of subjective "consciousness" is represented in the wave function extending into the past and future entangled with other wave functions and the volition or fee will of the quantum is represented in its idiosyncratic revelation of the particle when wave function collapse occurs.

The brain inherited the dynamics to make our form of subjective consciousness possible long before multi-celled organisms evolved. LECA the founding single-celled eucaryote already possessed the G-protein linked receptors found in the brain, and going even deeper -- LUCA the last common ancestor of all life, possessed a chemi-osmotic excitable membrane, enabling chaotic sensitivity in the butterfly effect during bursting and beating. In the context of animal brains, these in turn, lead to phase-front processing, which forms a representation of the same dynamics involved in quantum measurement, bringing in quantum entanglement into the dynamics, driven by self-organized criticality at tipping points running from individual ion channels to whole brain dynamics.

This means that the universe is a sentient cosmos, evolving to make possible a fully intimate connection between subjective and objective aspects of reality, in which existential "isness" and objective behaviour reach a consummation in the sentient brain in conscious perception and intentional will. Consciousness can then intentionally affect the physical universe, just as we experience it to do, by collapsing the wave function of the "multiverse" of quantum probabilities into the line of cosmic history we experience, through Schrodinger's cat paradox. This is what we experience as conscious decision-making, affecting the world around us, for better or worse.

This in turn means that, as a consummating manifestation of cosmic sentience, we have a personal and collective responsibility to fulfil this emergent quest and to preserve and unfold the diversity of life in the universe and this is what the meaning and purpose of life is all about. It is we ourselves, the universe's sentient beings, who form the consummating manifestation of the interactive catastrophe set off by symmetry-breaking in the cosmic origin rising to biospheric symbiosis in comlex life on the cosmic equtor in space-time and it is we who must needs protect and unfold the diversity of life so that the process can reach ultimate fulfillment. The buck stops with us and the fate of the universe and life within it becomes our personal responsibility to protect, rather than exploit.

Religious notions of deity in the form of an all-powerful God are an imaginary externalisation of this emergent cosmic principle personalised in the form of an anthropomorphic agent with all-too-human emotions of jealousy, wrath and compassion, giving form to tohu-va-vohu -- chaos without form or void. This leads to an abandonment of personal responsibility for the preservation of life and a root confusion between subjective and objective manifestations, in which personality, moral judgment and legislative manufacture, are perceived to have shaped a lifeless world, thus deprecating the intrinsic fecundity of the natural universe to manifest in space-time in the emergence and evolving diversity of sentient life, invoking instead the edict "let there be light" and the false notion of creationism by manufacture, or in its metamorphosis, intelligent design. At the same time, religion lays false claim to present a final account of our conscious destiny in the life hereafter beyond the mortal coil in a way which dislocates us from the natural world and its protection.

The danger is that religion disregards the very principles of evolutionary emergence of the sentient universe that are key to avoiding a critical tipping point, causing climate and ecological crisis, threatening our survival in the enclosing biosphere of planet Earth in an apocalyptic end of days. We likewise face a parallel danger from rampant objective materialism, which denies any cosmological role for consciousness, and in which any exploitative outcome is a win for the perpetrator, allowing business as usual to become predatory and personal gain to become destructive to the survival of the diversity of life.

Hence the situation is extremely urgent and a revolution of understanding of what subjective consciousness is and its role in the natural universe is essential for our survival. Among the diversity of mental states, dreaming and visionary and psychedelic experiences give us further understanding of the intrinsic nature of the subjective, to help humanity make this transition, without which it becomes all too easy for us to confuse consciousness with merely being a ghost in the machine of objective reality.