This is an excerpt of a talk for my book "Transcendental Metaphysics" (TM). I can imagine that with such an esoteric title, this talk may not be very attractive to many people in audience, most of who have convictions based on a very scientific background and have little sympathy for the questions of spirituality.
Nevertheless, this book is exactly that, an attempt to bridge the spiritual and science based realms. An attempt to show one the one hand that many of the spiritual questions can perhaps be addressed from a scientific, technological point of view and on the other hand that our scientific method itself is also not necessarily equipped to reveal the truth of each and every question.
The practical value for you as a listener may be -as I hope- that this talk (or my book) will challenge the certainty of your assumptions and belief systems and that you may adopt an open-mindedness towards potential alternative explanations.
"Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Do we exist? How do we know? What is reality made of? What is consciousness? Why is there something rather than nothing? Do we have a soul? an afterlife? Where do good and evil come from?"
These are questions many people at a certain point in their life -usually in adolescence- ask themselves. Some people find their answers in science or philosophy, others in spirituality or religion and yet others try to formulate their own answers.
In fact, most of these questions belong to the branch of philosophy called "Metaphysics", the study of that which is beyond the physical.
Since these questions are supposed to be beyond the methods of science and technology, it seems we are left groping in the dark.
Or aren't we?
Science and spirituality may have found an interesting overlap and interface for exchange of ideas in modern information technology. The notion that not matter or energy are the most foundational cornerstones of that what is, but information. Not in the least popularised in films such as "the Matrix", "world on a wire", "Tron" etc. we might start to wonder whether we are not living in some kind of simulated world ourselves- perhaps even a kind of computer simulation.
This idea might have seem completely crazy 30 years ago, with the popularisation of information technology via the internet, the increase in resolution and realistic representations of fantastical worlds in games and films and coming advances in holograms (like the holodeck in Star Trek) and quantum computing, it is starting to become less preposterous than we might have thought initially.
In fact, there is a whole branch of physics developing -called digital physics- with well-known professors and adepts such as Verlinde, David Deutsch, van 't Hooft, Konrad Zuse, Edward Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, John Archibald Wheeler, Frank Tipler, von Weizsäcker, Paola Zizzi, Seth Lloyd, James Gates etc., who try to explain the phenomena of physics from an essential digital medium perspective and with substantial success. Reality as an information processor. There might be more to these ideas than meets the eye.
We find this idea also back in spiritual traditions from Hinduism and Buddhism which speak about the world as "Maya" or "illusory/under a veil". Similarly in Western traditions we find Plato's cave and the word "Apocalypse" from the Christian tradition literally means "unveiling". And what about the notion from the Bible "In the beginning there was the word"? A striking pointer to reality as a product of information processing.
In the film the Matrix Neo undergoes such an "unveiling" process and discovers that his "assumed reality" is not so real as it seemed.
But even if reality is not as real as it may seem, this still does not answer all of our metaphysical questions, especially what consciousness is. If we are simulated, who are our simulators? is their world real or are they themselves also a product of a simulation? Are there nested simulations? Is it turtles all the way down? Does this change anything about the question what the meaning of life is?
I certainly can't claim that I know the answers to these questions, but I may present some ideas that can be helpful in our quest for the "truth".
In my book I first start with what is knowable at all. This is the domain of "epistemology". Our mental knowledge is essentially informational of character and that poses some limitations as to what can and what can't be known. This is a very interesting topic as such and I can give a complete talk on this topic per se later.
That said, science and logic-however limited- are our only ways to acquire knowledge. Perhaps the best proof that we have truly understood a phenomenon beyond the status of mere theory is when we are able to reduce it to practice in the form of a piece of technology. Or maybe I should say "tech-know-logy".
In my book TM I try to gather evidence pointing towards reality as the product of information processing. A dictionary definition of information is on the one hand " communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence" it relates to signals or characters which represent data" but also relates to "a numerical quantity that measures the uncertainty in the outcome of an experiment to be performed" in the more technological sense of the word.
So for information to meaningfully communicate knowledge, there must be some kind of conscious or at least sentient receiver who is able to decode the signals or characters that represent this knowledge. There is somehow an inherent assumption in the notion of "information" that sentient observers exist. There is an experiencing entity to whom this information makes sense. Even in the case of DNA and RNA as information carriers, they make sense (in a physical way) to the organism dealing with them.
In my book I therefore formulate a hypothesis, that everything in Nature is sentient (up to the smallest subatomic particles) to a certain degree, as everything is involved in some kind of information exchange with its environment. This is not a new hypothesis, this is the ancient hypothesis of panpsychism or hylozoism, which has an increasing number of supporters among scientists. Especially, since science has been unable to explain the occurrence of consciousness or sentience in a reductionist manner. (This is why scientists speak of the hard problem of consciousness).
But since everything exchanges information according to certain rules, in a certain sense you can say that everything is computing. This is how I come up with the notion of "pancomputational Panpsychism".
In fact what I claim is that there is only one phenomenon in reality which is not computed and which can't be reduced to computations, which is Sentience (of which consciousness is a particular complex form), the ability to sense, to experience. I call this Conscienergy in my book as it is a kind of conscious or sentient energy. Other phenomena arise as a consequence of the complex interplay of these numerous panpsychic conscienergy entities. In terms of Star wars, our bodies are made of midichlorians. The Greek and Romans also considered a similar notion. Next to our soul, the Anima, our body consisted of countless subsouls, the animai.
So in fact I hypothesise a kind of pyramid or fractal of sentient entities in analogy to the ideas of Cyd Ropp in her book "A simple explanation of absolutely everything" (see image above). Our conscienergy, which you might call a soul, inhabits a body made of cells, each cell perhaps also has its own level of consciousness or sentience. It is made out of countless (macro)molecules, which are inhabited by a conscienergy at that level, molecules are built from atoms which each have their own conscienergy or soul. All the way down to the first subatomic particles which are in fact a kind of standing waves.
For something to exist (ex-sist is a contraction of ex and sist, to stand out), to stand out from the rest in a manner which can be observed, it must have a minimum stability, live long enough to be observed. The only energy phenomena that can be stably observed in fact are kind of standing waves. It's the basis for string theory. Once a quantum fluctuating energy loops into its own pathway establishing a standing wave, it comes to know itself and proto-sense becomes proto-consciousness. It is like the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros, the tailbiting snake which also stands for consciousness.
In my book, I go into quite some detail about a possible discrete nature of space and time and reality as a giant living super quantum computing conscious entity, build of entities similar to itself. This leads to a kind of monism (everything is ultimately consciousness or sentience if you prefer) as opposed to a dualistic view in which consciousness and matter are different things.
This hypothesised kind of "Theory of Everything" then allows me to speculate about the answers of the previously mentioned metaphysical questions, which can be a topic for a further talk.
In conclusion I am hypothesising that everything is ultimately sentience (or consciousness) and that all physical phenomena take place in this substrate built by the bodies of the conscienergy entities, which is both panpsychic and pancomputational - although probably not in the sense of a present day von Neumann architecture computer.
In a way the consciousness or sentience may be the only concept qualifying as metaphysical or transcendent and everything takes physically place within the interplay of form-products arising therefrom.
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You can find my books on Amazon in paperback or ebook format:
Technovedanta (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07D92DZYZ),
Transcendental Metaphysics (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07D912ZW7)
Is Intelligence an Algorithm? (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1785356704)
Is Reality a Simulation? An Anthology (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07D7JX4RS)