Is Consciousness Fundamental to the Cosmos?

This is a topic that’s been lurking around the edges of the discussions of the multiverse theory. It almost crops up when the anthropic principle and the topic of God has been discussed. It is embedded in the multiverse theory that dumps us here as part of a grand hacker’s job in some simulation software. So, I viewed this video interview of Andre Linde, the Russian Cosmologist, now at Stanford, who has worked primarily in Inflationary Theory. According to Linde, “If we avoid consciousness we artificially limit our ability to understand what’s really going on in the Universe.” Wow, that is quite a detour from even the bizarre stuff we’ve been reading about the multiverse. Linde explains that a cosmologist named Brice deWitt decided to write Schroedinger equations for the wave function of the entire universe. What he discovered was that how fast the function changes (the time derivative) is proportional to the energy of the wave function, and the total energy of the system is zero. This means the universe is not changing. Well, not possible, right? The only way to resolve this dilemma is to take into consideration the OBSERVER as part of the system. “Observation is what makes the Universe come alive,” says Linde. So, if you remove the observer’s “stuff” from the equations, then you get wave functions that don’t equal zero – the universe starts looking more interesting than a big goose egg.

The interviewer asks the question, “It seems like the universe has been around a lot longer than sentient beings, so how could this be?” Linde refers to the Copenhagen School (regarding the Schrodinger Uncertainty Principle), that observation creates existence, and then the object looks like it existed before the observation. Linde then gives an analogy to the history of thinking regarding matter and space/time. At the beginning with Newtonian physics, we thought matter was the most important aspect, and space and time only existed for matter to move through. Then with General Relativity, space/time acquired its own degree of freedom, equal to matter. Now, we have Super-space (I assume related to String Theory), where particles of matter are the excitations of the geometry of Superspace. Linde poses this question: “Could consciousness be the same? Will we find that consciousness has degrees of freedom like space/time, and that it’s also fundamental to the cosmos?” Psychologists have picked up this interesting information, and have even gone so far as to say that consciousness may be a parallel universe in its own right.

Science or philosophy? I’m not sure, but it is interesting to think about.