The mainstream scientific understanding of consciousness is that it is a phenomenon generated by the electrical activity of the brain. It is thus a material thing, something within the laws of physics. It would be difficult for most scientists to consider any other notion of consciousness, because mainstream science is strongly committed to philosophical materialism, the belief that nothing exists in the universe other than atoms and physics, as Epicurus said all those centuries ago.
Despite this widely held view, including by leading neuroscientists, there is a growing body of evidence indicating that consciousness cannot be explained in this way. In his 2018 book, Real Magic, Dean Radin reports on hundreds of studies,. Radin draws on decades of research, including work with government psychic programs, to claim that consciousness can produce effects such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis. If you’d like to see other evidence, you might ask your favorite AI a question like, “How many peer-reviewed studies indicate that consciousness is more than an emergent property of Darwinian evolution?”
I’ve long been convinced of these views, not only from the studies, but because I’ve personally had several experiences which could not have happened without telepathy and/or precognition being involved. Some of you may already be in agreement with these ideas, some may be open to at least considering them, and some may reject them utterly, due to a deeply held belief in philosophical materialism.
I won’t devote any more time in trying to prove that consciousness is non-material, and that it has the capacities claimed in the various studies. Instead, what I want to do in this article is to explore the consequences of these ideas, if we assume they are established science. If you’ll indulge me in this exercise, I think you will find the results to be of considerable interest.
Conscious agency
Telepathy, precognition, and the like may be interesting, but they are not the essential truth that has been uncovered. That essential truth is the reality of conscious agency. – the fact that consciousness is a non-material force, a force that can exercise agency, to one extent or another, in the material world.
That conscious agency exists is itself a scientific game-changer, a revolutionary paradigm shift. But the real story to be told is the implications of this paradigm, for life, evolution, and all things biological. We will be delving into that story, and our investigation will be accelerated by some of the latest results in mainstream biology. These results click into place in a new way when the fact of conscious agency is inserted into the stories they are telling.
The nature of organisms
We can take ourselves as examples of organisms. We have bodies that have certain agilities and capabilities that enable us to interact appropriately with our physical and social environment, and we have minds that govern how we employ our bodies. The operation of our minds can be seen as the expression of our immaterial, conscious intent, enhanced by the cognitive powers provided by our brains. An organism is the means by which consciousness can exercise agency in the physical world.
Every species of organism, from microbes to elephants, has its own kind of mind, suited to what we might call its lifestyle. A bat has great flying agility and a capacity for sonar, and its mind engages in orchestrating maneuvers and sound so as to result in the catching of a tasty flying insect. We can watch this happening and yet hear no sound at all. In his 2023 book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yong introduces the concept of umwelt (the world that surrounds one). He shows how different species live in what is in effect a world of their own, one whose existence we might not even be aware of.
Interacting with our umwelt – the higher mind
When we look out at the world, we don’t just see objects, we see meaningful objects. At the same moment that we see a face, we know who it is, or else we know it is the face of someone we don’t know. For us to see the world (our umwelt) in this way, a great deal of pre-processing is required.
What I mean by ‘pre-processing’ is a multi-stage parsing process. In the case of vision, this means that edges and shapes need to be identified, then from that objects, even obscured ones, need to be teased out. These objects then need to be referred to our memory banks, retrieving any memories or associations that belong with those objects. Do we recognize that face? Is it friend or foe? Some associations are emotional in nature. If a snarling dog is in the scene, its umwelt presence might come to us along with the feeling “Watch out, danger, direct your attention here!” How is all this pre-processing accomplished?
In his remarkable 2014 book, Making Sense, Peter Moddel introduces the term ‘higher mind’, to identify the place where this pre-processing is handled. This higher mind is a conscious agent, carefully curating our umwelt for us. It brings to our attention the things we need to be aware of in order to deal effectively with our umwelt. Thus our total mind includes two centers of consciousness, our aware consciousness and our higher mind, both supported by our physical brain.
Our higher mind is aware of more things than we are aware of, and it is aware sooner. It’s like our aware consciousness is the president of a country, and the higher mind is the intelligence agency. Such an agency collects all kinds of information from all over the world, but it only reports to the president what he needs to be aware of. This filtering process, in our own case and in the case of a nation, is essential. Just as a president doesn’t have time to review every internal memo of the intelligence agency, so we don’t have time to do all the pre-processing that is needed to enable our interaction with our umwelt.
In the face of a time-critical threat, our higher mind can sometimes take action on its own, without waiting to inform our aware consciousness. Like you’re sitting next to a vase, and it starts to tip over. At the very instant you become aware of the tilting vase, you also become aware that your hand has already moved toward catching the vase. This has happened to me many times, and you may have had similar experiences. You might have thought that you’re hand responded by ‘automatic reflex’, but no, this was a conscious act of your higher mind.
In biology nothing is ‘automatic’ – the conscious body
Just as we take it for granted that we interact with the world at a high cognitive level, so we take it for granted that our bodies keep on functioning, with homeostasis maintained , etc. We might think these body functions all happen automatically. But again no, the management of bodily functions is too sophisticated for that to be true. There is conscious agency involved in using glands to manage the various organs, in releasing adrenaline when it is needed for fight or flight response, activating and deactivating T-cels in the fight against infections, etc.
Cognitive agency manages bodily functions, but there is no single site of agency , no ‘lower mind’ corresponding the the higher mind. Rather, it is conscious agency, organized hierarchically, and distributed all the way down, to the level of individual cells. A cell is itself a complex organism, that must manage its metabolism along with fulfilling whatever role it plays. If it is invaded by bacteria it knows to raise a flag outside its membrane to attract the next white blood cell that tumbles by, which then enters through a prepared tube, and dutifully fights the bacteria.
We think its all about us, an independent agent that operates in a high-meaning umwelt, but in fact we’re just one member of a complex cooperative community of conscious agents., acting together to maintain our functioning organism. Our aware consciousness is supported by a community of conscious agents, all aimed at enabling our aware consciousness to successfully navigate its civilization-level umwelt.
This pattern of agency distribution resonates with our earlier analogy of a President. At the level of foreign policy (the umwelt), he needs only a single agency – the intelligence service. But the nation itself (the body) is a complex community of agents,, from provinces, to counties, to towns, to businesses, all the way down to individual citizens.
The unfolding of mind in the developing organism
In his 2023 book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology, Philip Ball reports on the latest scientific discoveries in biology. The book could be described as iconoclastic, as it shows how the latest discoveries shatter so many long-held assumptions. Even the primary role of genes comes into question, as we shall see. The book has a broad scope and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in biology, or in how scientific progress happens. Here I will only be referring to one of the topics covered: the development of the human embryo and fetus.
Ball explains how these early developmental processes go through several stages, and at each stage it’s as if a new level of intelligence is at work, managing an ever more complex developmental process. Time and again in his explanation, he remarks that biology needs some way to talk about agency, which somehow seems to operate long before any kind of actual consciousness could be present. Broad has his research has been, Ball evidently is not familiar with the discovery of conscious agency, and how it activates every level of life. It is not as if a new level of intelligence is at work, rather it is in fact a new level of mind becoming active.
What this means is that the development of an organism is governed not by gene expression, but by the expression of unfolding levels of mind. Ball explains how DNA becomes simply one of the tools available with which to construct the developing organism. Each new level of mind comes into activation when the organism reaches the stage where that new level is required in order to continue the developmental process. Higher levels of mind remain inactive, asleep one might say, until they are needed.
Studies into child psychology reveal that the unfolding of higher levels of mind does not stop when the human baby is born, but continues through childhood to adolescence. Theories such as those by Freud, Erikson, and Piaget describe development as a series of age-related stages, each characterized by distinct psychological challenges and abilities. At each stage there are changes in bodily facility and the level of mind. And at the same time there are changes in the perceived umwelt. The umwelt of the nursing infant is different from that of the two year old language learner, or the twelve year old who is beginning to experience sex-related hormones. Each stage of development is aimed at preparing the organism to deal with the next umwelt it will be exposed to. The whole pre-birth process is aimed at preparing the baby to survive in the umwelt outside the womb. And the stages of childhood development are aimed at preparing us to finally enter the adult-world umwelt.
The fertilized egg, the first cell of life, already contains all the levels of mind that will eventually find expression in the organism. It is these levels of mind that determine the nature of the organism, much more than the nature of the genes. Thus it is after all not so surprising that there is so little difference between the genes of humans and the genes of mice. From our parents we inherit genes and we inherit mind, in all its levels. And it is the mind part that is most determinative of how we turn out.
There has of course been a great deal of research devoted to finding a genetic explanation for the traits of humans and other organisms. And there are many ways in which genes are the causative agents, eye color being one familiar example. But when such research starts looking for things such as a ‘criminality gene’, then it is time to step back and review all of this gene research, so as to identify where the role of mind is in fact operative rather than that of genes.
Let me close off this section by reviewing the principles in an extreme case – the caterpillar that becomes a butterfly. This organism has three primary levels of mind. There is the mind that drives the crawling caterpillar, the mind that builds new structures within the cocoon, and the mind of the fluttering butterfly. These three levels of mind all lie latent in the very first cell of a new caterpillar. And of course the umwelt of the caterpillar is very different than the umwelt of the butterfly or the cocoon-residing architect.
Conscious agency and the evolution of species
If the construction of an organism results for the mechanical activity of inanimate DNA strands, then one is hard pressed to explain the improvement of species over time. It took the genius of a Darwin to come up with the theory of random mutations and survival of the fittest. This theory has a modicum of plausibility, especially for those who are eager to embrace the notion that atoms and physics is all there is. Perhaps species improvement could happen this way, in an atoms only universe, if we assume that any kind of life would be possible in such a universe. But fortunately for us, in a universe with conscious agency, the evolution of species is much easier to understand.
In the previous section, regarding the development of an organism, I pointed out that the various levels of mind possessed by an organism must all be already present, though latent, in the very first cell of the organism. This includes the final umwelt-level of mind, along with its reality-parsing higher mind. In an earlier section, regarding the higher mind itself, I pointed out that the higher mind can sometimes initiate action on its own, as in the case of the tilting vase, and the preliminary movement of our hand toward catching it.
We might say that the higher mind violated inter-layer protocols, in order to better serve the needs of the organism as a whole. The higher mind was able to preempt the decision making role of the normally-in-charge umwelt-level mind. The higher mind exceeded its level of authority, in response to an urgent situation.
Let us now consider some stage in fetal development, when some intermediate level of mind is engaged in organizing that stage’s development process. While this is happening, the next layer of mind is waiting in the wings, so to speak, waking up to manage the next stage of development. This next layer of mind has an understanding of the value of the output of the current stage of development, an understanding that goes beyond the understanding of the currently active level of mind. Just as the higher mind can preempt the role of the umwelt-level mind, so could that next layer of mind during fetal development pre-empt some part of the current layer’s role, in order to improve the output of that stage. In this way the incremental improvement of the species can be consciously guided.
I’ve clearly gone out on a speculative limb here, trying to pin down a specific mechanism driving evolution. But I think the necessary elements are there, with the presence of all layers of mind in the game, and the possibility of cross-layer preemption. That is in any case my thesis as regards conscious agency and species evolution.
Multi-level organisms and the fractal nature of life
In his 2016 book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, Peter Wohlleben reports on the latest research, and his own experiences, to tell a fascinating story of how a forest operates. As with our earlier book, How Life Works. our author finds time and again what seems to be intelligent behavior involving both trees and fungi. As you can tell from his title, he does not shy away from using the terms of consciousness (feel) to describe the characteristics of trees. One wonders if recognizing the reality of conscious agency might go mainstream one of these days.
Wohlleben tells us how one tree can provide nourishment to another tree, through intertwined root systems, and in this way trees can cooperate to restore an ailing tree to health. He explains the synergistic relationship between trees and fungi, which exchange nutrients, a mutually beneficial commodity trading relationship. Perhaps most dramatic of his stories is that of the wood wide web, where a giant fungus lies under and entire forest, transporting nutrients this way and that, taking care of the forest like a gardener taking care of a garden.
The term, wood wide web, is intended to convey a similarity to the world wide web, the internet. This all-encompassing fungus can generate electrical signals that propagate down the fungal tendrils, like synapses in the brain. It seems the fungus is acting both as a neural-net brain of the forest, with the same network operating as a food distribution system, what we might think of as the blood stream of the forest. I’m tempted to say the forest itself, in this way, becomes an organism. Trees are the cells of the organism, the fungus is the mind, a conscious agent enhanced by its neural-net tendril brain.
Perhaps the designation of organism goes too far. But let’s look at some of the elements of this story, that do tend to justify such a designation. First of all, if we do want to think of a forest as an organism, then we are also led to think of forests as a species. Clearly the complex relationships among trees, and between trees and fungi, have evolved over time, leading to incremental forest improvements. These improvements then spread from forest to forest. Thus has proceeded the evolution of the forest species.
As noted earlier, every cell in our body is an organism, each of which has some degree of agency. A forest, as organism, exhibits this same structure, being made up of sub-organisms. We see here a pattern of life, existing fractally at different scales.
The unfolding of conscious agency
Let us step back and consider the whole history of life on Earth. There was a time, I think we can safely assume, when there was no life on Earth. At some point there was the first life, and then life has evolved and spread to just about every nook and cranny of the planet. Once life exists, it seems we can tell a reasonable story about how it evolved and developed from there. But how did a first organism come into existence? Where did that first spark of life come from, resulting in a conscious agent managing some physical form, a first organism? Of course I cannot answer that question. But I can speculate. It seems to me there must be some kind of life force, a level of agency that is not itself an organism, It would seem the Earth has been colonized by a life force agent. On this point, as well as many other points in this article, it is clear that more research is called for.