Consciousness and the Wavefunction

 

We experience the sensation of consciousness in the "now", meaning at this very moment. We cannot again experience the sensation of consciousnesses of what has transpired before "now" nor can we experience the sensation of conscious of what might transpire after "now". We may have memory of what transpired before "now" as the result of conscious awareness of it but that consciousness has been not only been replaced but has been replaced wakeful moment by wakeful moment ever since. 

Consciousness does not inform us of all reality of existence but only of the reality that we observe by means of our senses of sight, touch, sound, smell and taste in the "now" of the present moment. It fixes our knowledge of the state of reality in the present moment to be that which we observe and eliminates all other possible states of reality within our purview at that moment. And, it may or may not leave traces of that which was ever so fleeting in our conscious purview as a memory in our brain. Then our brain moves on to receive and process more sensory information flooding into to it to create a new moment of consciousness of what we are now sensing.

Of course, if nothing within our purview has changed, then our consciousness remains the same conscious moment to conscious moment. It is analogous to making a movie of a bird at rest on an limb. The images in every frame of the movie remains the same until the bird takes flight and then and only then does the image in every frame change. And so is with conscious awareness of reality and the changes within it.

 And, it may or may leave traces of that ever so fleeting moment in our conscious purview as a memory in our brain. The brain discards as not worthy of memory most of the sensory information it receives. But then our brain moves on the receive and process more sensory information flooding into to it to create a new moment of consciousness of what we sensed.

"The fog comes. on little cat feet. It sits looking. over harbor and city. on silent haunches. and then moves on. " ~ Carl Sandburg

Consciousness informs us nothing which we cannot or have not observed because the sensation of consciousness occurs only after the detection and processing of sensory data in the brain. The state of existence beyond conscious purview can exist as any and every evidentiality. But only at the moment of consciousness does the the state of unknown reality "collapse" into what we consciously perceive as the reality of existence. That is, existence is captured by the observer as a frame in the movie of existence at that moment. 

In modern quantum physics, all possible eventualities of  the state of existence is called a "wavefunction" and is expressed in the language of mathematics. Like consciousness, we don't exactly know what the wavefunction represents, only that observation of some existent entity causes the wavefunction to "collapse" result into a single entity out of its innumerable possible states. The most famous example of this is the double slit experiment in which a photon of light exists at any and all positions in space until it is observed at which time it becomes fixed at a specific position in space. As with consciousness, awareness of reality is only possible by observation.

The experiment gives us a conscious glimpse into the weird world of quantum physics but it raise the question of whether consciousness is the but the "collapse" of the quantum state of the world as our brain "observes" the material world in which the brain is immersed. Could it be that existence is an indescribable and unknowable "wavefunction" of which we are aware only when our brain "collapses" it with its powers of "observation" of sensory data?

Interesting thought but unlikely to be true.  Yet, as humans, we can only know what we can observe and consciously experience. Asking the right question -- however unlikely -- is the key to discovery of the reality of nature.