What is reality? What is its nature? Where is the experience of consciousness that we all share coming from? Is consciousness the ground of reality, or its product? How do the different ways to answer these questions in science shape the very future of science and its findings on who we are, and more deeply: what is life, and consciousness?
To explore and address these fundamental questions, researchers Anil Seth, Bernardo Kastrup, and Christof Koch were invited to share their distinct perspectives on consciousness and reality in a panel at the International Conference on Psychedelic Research in Haarlem, Netherlands. Held on June 5th, the panel Psychedelics, consciousness, and the nature of reality invited the three scientists to explore the relationships between consciousness and reality, considering that psychedelics lead to altered states of consciousness where the very nature of reality changes, leading to the question: What is reality? The three scientists illustrate three different paradigms in science currently trying to answer these questions, and in some ways framing the future of science.
Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Science at University of Sussex aims to answer these questions through a materialist perspective which basically states that consciousness is the product of the brain. Consciousness and our perception of the world are controlled hallucinations created by our living bodies.
To explain this theory, Seth describes the way the brain operates as what he calls a “prediction engine”. Because the brain has no direct contact with light or sound but is only made up of streams of electrical impulses, says Seth, then perception is just an informed guess, not a direct perception. The brain is basically combining sensory signals received with expectations or beliefs about what caused these signals. Our previous experiences are indeed associated with these sensory signals to predict what reality is. In this perspective, an hallucination is an uncontrolled perception, whereas our perception of reality would then be a kind of controlled hallucination where the brain uses the sensory signals to predict what reality is. Looking at the collective level, when we live in a group, adds Seth, we agree about our controlled hallucinations we call reality.
In a fundamentally different perspective, Bernardo Kastrup, philosopher and computer scientist, executive director of the Essentia Foundation, defends the theory that consciousness lies at the foundation of reality. To explain his theory, Kastrup compares our experience of reality with being a pilot in a plane. To get a sense of what the environment the plane is in and how to drive in this very environment, the pilot never directly experiences the environment but can only guess part of it through the sensors of the plane. Temperature, speed, altitude, etc. are never directly experienced by the pilot, but only read through sensors. That is precisely why we can have autopilot on planes. But the sensors then introduce biases, limit and frame what reality is for each individual so that we only have a partial experience of what the full extent of reality is: we only know the dashboard, and never really touch the sky. And because we all have different “planes” (bodies), we all experience a different piece of reality. And so, for Kastrup, consciousness is not created by the brain as in the materialist view, but rather limited by the body. In this perspective, consciousness pre-exists the body while our experience of reality is limited by our embodiment. Going even further, Kastrup defends the idea that each individual consciousness is part of a global consciousness.
In a similar approach, Christof Koch, cognitive scientist, neurophysiologist and computational neuroscientist, Chief scientist at Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, advocates for panpsychism, the idea that some form of consciousness can be found in all things. This approach resonates with Kastrup’s perspective in that it postulates that consciousness is the ground for reality rather than one of its products, as proposed by Seth. But here, consciousness is seen as present in everything: rocks, plants, any elements and even atoms. The very combination of atoms and its complexity will explain that there are different ways of being conscious: the experience of the world of a rock, a plant, a fish, star or human beings will be different. And for human beings with complexity for example, comes self-awareness. So, the human experience of consciousness is not an exception, but just one variation in the different ways of being conscious in the universe. In panpsychism, even the Sun, the Moon or planets are conscious. While this perspective differs significantly from the materialist worldview that has long dominated Western science, it also resonates with the worldviews of many traditional societies, in which human beings are seen as integrated within the universe as a whole and consciousness is shared among all elements of reality.
These theories would obviously deserve to be studied more in-depth as they are very complex, and we are only giving a quick overview here. What’s truly fascinating is that while these perspectives disagree on whether consciousness shapes matter or merely results from it, they ultimately agree on a core concept: our experience of reality is a projection or an illusion. If you want to dive deeper into the idea that reality is a simulation or an illusion, you can explore the work of renowned scientists like Federico Faggin or Donald Hoffman
Another important common fact in these theories is that our way of being conscious is just one way of being conscious and limited by the fact that we experience it through our brain. This triggers a lot of exciting questions: what are these other ways of being conscious? How can you access them? Which one is reality? Etc. More fascinating is also how these ideas resonate with ancient wisdoms from Hinduism, as mentioned by Kastrup himself in some of his talks, and very complex ideas about consciousness as a whole (Brahman) or the fact that our perception if clouded by ego and attachments hiding the ultimate reality through the concept of Maya. There would be more to say obviously, but as per the introduction to this panel this is very exciting for the future of science as there is a lot to discover and understand about consciousness, who we are, but also because these findings not only reconcile Science and Consciousness, but it builds some bridges between Science and Traditional Wisdom. More broadly, this research also means that we are only starting the journey towards the understanding of who we are, what we are, and that this can lead us to a completely new way of seeing the world, our place within this in and of interacting with it and all the being making up this very world…Are we ready for such a Revolution?
