I’m not just here to write and sell awesome science fiction.

My characters live in worlds where consciousness, intuition, and the power of summative epiphany are vital factors in everyday survival. Along with them, I routinely marvel at the universe and consciousness. And I’ve been asking myself if you might as well.

Do you delight in some of the small, beautiful things nature has to offer? Honeybees. A mineral crystal’s perfect symmetry? The comical way those squirrels steal from your bird feeder? How many times a day do you find yourself smiling and feeling happy in your heart?

Are you more likely to be a director rather than a mere spectator in everyday activities? Are you sometimes aware of humanity as a whole? Have you noticed how creative expression creates abundance? Do you share beauty, purpose, rhythm, and flow with those you love? Compassion, truth, love, and intuitive uniqueness? How do they relate to your personal level of consciousness?

And you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t ready to give back to others. Seriously. I know because I’ve designed this website using special psycho-reactive filters. You couldn’t even open this URL if you weren’t my kind of person. Or visiting aliens. Or maybe that weird concept’s just a fault of my quirky sense of humor. You decide.

**Pssssst!** … Hey, you! Yes, you! Are YOU just a critical mass of brain sparks and chemicals?

Anyway, we’re here to discuss consciousness. I don’t know about you, but my consciousness seems to have an independent life of its own. But can a dynamic, critical mass of neurons spawn an inner subjective state that feels like a first-person subjective experience?

I also feel that “consciousness” isn’t something we can carry around in a box. It’s more like a verb. It’s a moment-to-moment process. Then again, I’m not even sure what my brain has to do with it! My brain isn’t conscious. Instead, I am conscious. My first-person awareness is conscious.

I am 100% accountable for my biases.

If you’ve gradually become aware that YOU are a lot more than your thoughts and emotions, I’d post good odds that you’re also sympathetic with others, calm, and generally well-balanced. I’m not that far along the spectrum yet, and you should probably be aware of my deeply ingrained biases.

I believe that freedom is real. Human choices matter. Humanity is still growing and will continue to become extraordinary. Human beings share an overwhelming interdependence. While it may take a while, we are all capable of reaching higher states of being.

That may sound odd coming from someone who taught AP Physics and grew up in a Newtonian clockwork universe. Fortunately, I then studied quantum physics at the University of Colorado with a bunch of super smart people. (Doctor Albert A. Bartlett (1923-2013), Professor Emeritus in Nuclear Physics, was my academic advisor.)

In fact, while conducting my first “double-slit” experiment, I remember being shocked at the unparalleled strangeness of realizing that the act of observation might directly alter particle/wave behavior. Consciousness is required (and can have a causal impact) for certain quantum-mechanical effects to function. But isn’t the brain too hot and wet for quantum effects to operate there?

Okay. Time for a few definitions. (Don’t worry. There won’t be a quiz!)

Years later, after many long watch hours in USS Leftwich (DD-984) and USS Ingersoll (DD-990), I ran into the same problem you will. The biggest problem with understanding consciousness is the absence of a widely accepted definition.

It gets worse. According to Donald Hoffman at the University of California, “The scientific study of consciousness is in the embarrassing position of having no scientific theory of consciousness.” [Hoffman D., Consciousness and the Mind-Body Problem. Mind & Matter. 2008; 6(1): 87-121.] 

But — just to help out — here are some definitions:

- The Oxford Living Dictionary defines consciousness as “The state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings.”

- The Cambridge Dictionary states that consciousness is “the state of understanding and realizing something.”

- Yet, Wikipedia says, “Consciousness … is sentience or awareness of internal and external existence.”

- So, I had to ask: what’s the difference between consciousness and awareness? Apparently, awareness comes first. Consciousness is the quality of awareness. Awareness is the knowledge that something exists. You can sense it, touch it, and feel it, but you may not fully understand what the object is. Example: A red-tailed hawk sometimes lands nearby and watches me write. (What’s up with that?) I am sometimes subliminally aware of her, yet I’m never confident that we have been conscious of one another.

- According to Scientific American “Consciousness is everything you experience.”

But then we come to human self-awareness. 

According to Scientific American’s Ferris Jabr, “Consciousness is awareness of one’s body and one’s environment; self-awareness is recognition of that consciousness — not only understanding that one exists, but further understanding that one is aware of one’s existence.” 

And Jabr adds, “To be conscious is to think; to be self-aware is to realize that you are a thinking being and to think about your thoughts.”

Fortunately, my story characters are always standing by to help digest these big concepts.=

The characters in each of my books can become deeply introspective. Keeping to the rule of showing instead of telling, my characters have ongoing “perceptual experiences.” They taste things. They smell things and hear things with their own particular reactions. At times, my characters appear to be “phenomenally conscious” as they live and act out their lives within the creative part of my mind.

In my River of Light series, empath Janek Larrivay begins his many ordeals as one of Earth’s diplomatic envoys. Every alien he meets has a different kind of consciousness, and yet they learn to relate. The Dhyda look like big sea otters or weasels, yet may be more “human” than we are. The Moorad look like big sea urchins up on knobby-kneed stilts. They speak by rubbing their “speaking strands,” and the music they make can hang in the air such that it comes across as regular speech. Even the “evil aliens” that Janek encounters display awareness and imagination. 

(Spoilers here): One of these aliens actually murders Janek at the climax of one of his books. In fact, Janek had to die. He still needed to learn so many things about the universe and cosmic Unity. Fortunately for me as his author, Janek has learned to “live” and evolve as a discarnate being. And yet, things change for him in the series climax: Inherit the Night.

In Orphans of Fire, Daryle Chantree sometimes acts as an untutored ethologist as he gathers clues about animal consciousness. He even has to explain time travel to a friendly alien and learns that people other than your basic “humans” can think about past and future events.

My derived truth for this comes from watching my dogs and observing examples of foresight. They intentionally cache food. They rearrange their sleeping areas for later use, anticipate walks, and help me find my way home from those walks. And yes. I once caught Ruffian and Ripley rearranging books by author and subject. (Or maybe they were just teething and chewing up another paperback?)

Things I don’t understand (aka: watch me organize my ignorance).

I am not a philosopher or neuropsychologist. I’m just a science fiction writer who runs around with questions out the wazoo and learning from my mistakes. Plus or minus 10%, I know I’m conscious. And I suspect you’re conscious … unless you are an AI scoping on this article for Google. Even then, I wonder how long it will take for artificial intelligences to become conscious. (Please be my friend!)

On the other hand, I don’t feel very “aware” when anesthetized for surgery. Where was I when all that was going on? I must be somewhat conscious when I dream. But what about during dreamless sleep? And I have to write something every day to get that needed hit of dopamine. (Hugging someone or petting my dogs delivers oxytocin.) Uh, cool fact.

I have three children, and they are all brilliant. (Trust me. I’m a scientist, and I checked.) But when did they each become self-aware? Was there a shift in “cognitive maturation” when they hit four or five? How much language does a child need to learn before self-reflection starts and they realize they (and others) have a mind and not just a brain?

Are animals conscious? Sentient? Aware?

My dogs seem to know a lot about me and how to live alongside people. I’ve watched them dream. They have specific preferences. How introspective must dogs be to be someone’s fine pet?

What about our rabbit? She seems to notice when I’m late with her daily salad. And did you know that bunnies leap and kick when they’re happy? Happy? Or are they merely content? Doesn’t someone have to have some kind of “inner life” to notice they are happy?

What about our cat? Day to day, she acts like she’s more intelligent than the rest of us. But can she think about thinking? Doubtful. Does she hold beliefs about things she can’t directly perceive? How the heck can we ever know?

This is all so strange!

How do we separate our perceptions of raw experience (qualia) from our ability to access memories and share feelings about them? Was I conscious when I last saw a red apple? Or do I have to wait for my brain to interpret the color red and what it means to be an apple? 

Also, when I close my eyes and picture the color “red,” what does that have to do with the ruby light I’ve seen split through a prism? Or the flares I view when observing the Sun through a hydrogen-alpha-filtered telescope?

Accessing the memory of an apple probably means finding a specific memory in my brain. But what about the phenomenon of first experiencing (without interpretation) all there is to know about an apple? 

I know there’s supposed to be a correlation between active brain regions and what I’m aware of at any given moment. And yet, it doesn’t feel like my brain is generating my awareness of the world. It all seems to come from outside. Is some part of me acting like a radio or TV receiver for consciousness?

Where does all this consciousness come from? 

Happy to back me up on this, my characters have noticed this as well, and some have even gone in search of the source. I hope this enriches my novels. There are other star systems to explore, and a surprising number of aliens are quite willing to open up on the subject. (Who knew?)

I wonder if “consciousness” fascinates me because defining it is so elusive. Fortunately, I love to learn, and my imperfect understanding of these topics lets specific plot events sometimes blur the boundaries between science and paranormal phenomena. While my brain seems to follow all the laws of physics, my mind can get away with all kinds of squirrelly stuff. Try it. Can’t you picture something that is physically impossible? 

This lets my characters display telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and even survival of bodily death. And while “animals” can’t compare their mental states with ours using language, many of my characters interact with aliens who look a lot like animals and can.

Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Francis Crick said “[A] person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make up and influence them.” Can he be right?

Back when Newtonian physics explained the universe for me, I might have believed in physicalism and materialism. As Larry Dossey explains in an open science blog, “Physicalism is the doctrine that the real world consists simply of the physical world. Its close cousin is materialism, the creed that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications, as well as the doctrine that consciousness and will are wholly due to material agency.”

This is where neuroscientists run into trouble. The “hard problem” in neuroscience centers on finding the seat of consciousness within (and ONLY within) our brains. In other words, how do neurons and material brain states lead to perception and subjective experience? If our brain somehow establishes our identity and sense of self, what specific part or sequence of neuron excitation makes each of us … us?

Can neuroscience explain consciousness? It’s time for some fancy imaging techniques and big-name scientists.

We’re talking about:

- diffusion tensor imaging (DTI)

- electroencephalography (EEG)

- functional MRI (fMRI)

- magnetoencephalography (MEG)

- and voxel-based morphometry (VBM).

Although these techniques have provided no evidence that the brain produces consciousness, Richard Brown concludes: “So it appears that the sights, sounds and other sensations of life as we experience it are generated by regions within the posterior cortex. As far as we can tell, almost all conscious experiences have their origin there.”

Karl Pribram and Roger Penrose have devised holonomic brain theory and want me to accept that human consciousness is formed by quantum events and a holographic information storage system within my brain’s cells. But can oscillating electric waves in my cortex really generate diffraction patterns all set to form a neural hologram?  

Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose think consciousness starts at the quantum level inside neurons and teen-tiny cell structures called microtubules. But I “met” several cryo-cooled quantum supercomputers while researching Holding On For Life, and their fragile “thinking” parts (qubits) had to be kept super-cold (-273°C) to maintain coherence. I don’t know about you, but most of my brain works best around 36.9 ± 0.4°C ( about 98.4°F).

Could early languages and tool use have helped create consciousness? 

Boris Kotchoubey believes that human consciousness emerges from certain behaviors. “The main block of human consciousness is anticipatory behavior in a secure “virtual” space of symbolic relationships.”

And (still Kotchoubey): “The interaction between communication and play yields symbolic games, most importantly language; the interaction between symbols and tools results in human praxis. Taken together, this gives rise to a mechanism that allows a creature, instead of performing controlling actions overtly, to play forward the corresponding behavioral options in a “second reality” of objectively (by means of tools) grounded symbolic systems.” 

Could our brains have evolved the illusion of consciousness to help guide evolution? What advantage would a unified collection of memories, thoughts, and subjective feelings offer when combined to create a core of being and sense of self? Would that have helped an individual compete? Wouldn’t we have been better off if such an illusion demanded social interaction and support for any sense of consciousness to come together?

And the situation may remain murky. Physicist Nick Herbert wrote “Science’s biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot.”

Are our minds more than just our brains? Moving from “Materialism” to “Dualism.”

Pick up a three-pound blob of tofu. Tint it pinkish-beige and, if it is close to your body temperature, you will have a pretty good idea of what a brain feels like in your hands. 

So what? So, “dualists” believe that — in addition to our neural wetware — there may be a supplemental non-physical mental or spiritual world. Some even posit eternal attributes and souls. 

Is consciousness a fundamental component of reality? Or a basic building block of the universe? If organic tissue (or computer parts) can’t create consciousness, is consciousness more like a hidden electromagnetic field? Do our minds manifest themselves in the same way that a baseball game’s broadcast manifests itself through my radio?

Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch

Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has developed Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a measure of consciousness. According to Tononi, consciousness is “Everything we have. All we are. Everything we experience.”

He doesn’t believe that anything in the brain’s neural structure creates the mind, but that consciousness can be represented by certain physical processes that integrate information. He and Christof Koch believe that anything that integrates at least one bit of information has at least a tiny amount of consciousness. A teensy-weensy diode in your computer screen, for example, may have a very limited type of consciousness. Your whole cell phone may have a much higher degree of consciousness. They’ve even agreed that “anything at all could be conscious, providing that the information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and organized.” Tononi has also proposed “a mathematical measure φ that aims to measure not merely the information in the parts of a given system but also the information contained in the organization of the system over and above that in its parts. φ thus corresponds to the system’s degree of informational integration.”

Panpsychism.

In panpsychism, every small particle of matter holds small portions of proto-consciousness. This isn’t just sub-cellular aspects of neurons adding up to something subjective in our minds. This is a summation of tiny awarenesses that lead to our inner experiences of consciousness. 

Oliver Burkeman writes “Most of us, in our daily lives, think of consciousness as something over and above our physical being. The argument unfolds as follows: physicists have no problem accepting that certain fundamental aspects of reality – such as space, mass, or electrical charge – just do exist. They can’t be explained as being the result of anything else. Explanations have to stop somewhere. The panpsychist hunch is that consciousness could be like that, too – and that if it is, there is no particular reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter.”

Mind at large.

Is consciousness a “carrier wave” of meaning and purpose? Is consciousness fundamental? Along with electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity, is it another fundamental force?

As Larry Dossey explains, “The brain does not produce consciousness at all, any more than a television set creates the programs that appear on its screen. On the contrary, the brain filters and restricts consciousness, just as our senses limit the totality of experience to which we might otherwise have access.”

Similarly, philosopher Michael Grosso notes, “…the radio does not produce the radio waves; it detects, transmits, and filters them. If your radio breaks down, it doesn’t follow that the sounds you’re listening to have ceased to exist. They just cease to be detectable. An analogy is possible between this and the mind-brain relationship.”

Astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington may have agreed. “The idea of a universal Mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory; at least it is in harmony with it.”

And as physicist David Bohm observed, “Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty ... and if we don’t see this it’s because we are blinding ourselves to it.” 

But what if life is a quiz? What is the correct answer? Is consciousness our ultimate reality?

Are materialists right? Is pure consciousness merely an emergent property of brain architecture and neuron alignment?

Are dualists right? Is there a higher truth? What if consciousness is non-physical and separate from our brains and body?

And what about panpsychists? Are the smaller fragments of the universe conscious and fundamental to objective reality? Could our nervous systems include nested levels of distinct conscious observers?

Must we decide? Is there an ultimate truth? Among other fascinating perspectives on the topic of consciousness, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “One might usefully and without contradiction accept a diversity of models that each in their own way aim respectively to explain the physical, neural, cognitive, functional, representational and higher-order aspects of consciousness. There is unlikely to be any single theoretical perspective that suffices for explaining all the features of consciousness that we wish to understand. Thus a synthetic and pluralistic approach may provide the best road to future progress.”

But everything we “Earthlings” have ever learned has to be a matter of conscious experience, doesn’t it? I don’t see how consciousness can be an illusion, even though it often feels like my consciousness extends beyond my individual mind and outside physical space and time. 

I may never define consciousness, but I keep writing — and wondering — because I am conscious. And maybe that’s enough.

Fortunately for me, my fictional characters enjoy exploring the multiverse along with aspects of non-physical reality … and I will continue to let you know what we learn. Thanks for reading this, and please take a moment to check out some of my books on my Author Page.