Book Article in progress:
The Textbook of the Universe: The Genetic Ascent to God
by Steven E. Romer
Published 2003
This book presents a new theory of consciousness.
The book compiles and expands on 6 poster presentations by the author at 3 science conferences including:
4 posters presented at CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS PLACE IN NATURE: TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS August 7 - 11, 2001 * Skövde, Sweden http://www.ida.his.se/ida/consciousness/
and:
One poster presented at TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS - TUCSON 2002 The Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona April 8 - 12, 2002 * Tucson, Arizona http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/archived.htm
and:
One poster presented at THE SEVENTH CONFERENCE OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF CONSCIOUSNESS May 30th to June 2nd, 2003, at the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee http://www.cs.memphis.edu/~assc7/
The main idea of the book is that the perception of meaning can shed new light on the largest problems in the study of consciousness. Evolution is re-defined from an information viewpoint. The evolution of the brain is viewed in this light. One of the main ideas is the paradox that evolution did not equip human brains to understand the internal workings of brains properly. From this, and introspective analysis of the perception of meaning, combined with some ideas from the physics of time, a new theory of consciousness is presented.
Author summary of the Skovde, Sweden conference posters:
CONSCIOUSNESS AS PRIMARY NATURAL LAW
There is a new fundamental law of the universe. This is the law of conscious unity. This law is the driving force in FRONT of civilization, evolution, and the very nature of the physical universe. All of the universe is coherent, and symbolic like language, to this great consciousness being born in mankind. Consciousness is time and space transcendant, it UNIFIES as its chief characteristic. The early universe was a unity without space and time—it contained infinite possibility out of which our natural laws and matter congealed (apparently by “chance”). The later universe is a mirror-image echo of this original unity in the progressive development of the unity and flexibility of consciousness in life, with the only constraint on the universe, life, or civilization, being that the universe must operate in such a manner, or be constructed, in order to give rise to it. This great consciousness is the reason everything has coherence—from natural law, to our language and its structure. Since the effects are on probabilities working backward in what we see as time, this principle has been transparent to science. Like the theory of evolution, this theory has literally mountains of subtle evidence running through language, civilizations, life, the solar system, and the universe itself. This theory is an expansion of evolutionary theory backward in time to encompass the “coincidences” of Anthropic Cosmology, through the development of life. In the development of life, this adds a subtle controlling factor to the forms of life and a sort of direction to life’s development. It explains why the dinosaurs had to die off, and why we are constructed of cells with the exact same DNA in each of them. The theory explains all religion and mystical thought, from the idea of “heaven” to the existence of “God” or “gods” or even the worship of the Sun—as a REAL symbol on a grand scale of the future unity and the creative force of consciousness affecting life and development from beyond space and time in the future. Consciousness is SO fundamental, that it has been transparent to us and our science. The evidence for and nature of conscious processes is always reflected in other things—just like we cannot see sunlight directly passing in front of us, but only after it hits and reflects off something else. Carbon-based life, under the pressures of selection and death—the struggle of life—has become facets of this great unity like some great diamond on the horizon of our lives. To become conscious of the true nature of consciousness is the crowning glory of all human striving and curiousity. The universe was constructed by the object of our curiousity. It is the force of life. Consciousness breathes fire into the equations, to paraphrase the famous question of physicist Stephen Hawking.
I have investigated various avenues, and collected years of data to find support for this theory, and as you might imagine from its overarching nature, there is evidence everywhere. There is a way that I see and do things in my life that I have developed that allows me to see introspective evidence every day for the true nature of our consciousness. Some of that evidence is presented here in these four posters, but actually fills several volumes and hundreds of pages of notes over several years time. From this evidence, I have seen that everything we do is woven into reality for multifaceted meaning. We talk of someone’s speech being “meaningful on many levels” and implicitly know what this means. There is a reason for that. Reality is fundamentally LIKE that. Some event might have one meaning for me, and another for many other people, for example. I see other people going through life totally missing miraculous stuff because they do not expect there to be a basic quality of meaning and coherence to things. Together, all these levels of meaning ARE reality. Meaning is an intrinsic part of nature—made coherent and solidified by the principle of conscious unity. Another way I have worked on getting evidence for this view is by studying the brain itself. I have investigated the role of dopamine in the brain, and posited a theory in one of my posters having to do with the role of glial cells, for example. Another way of seeing evidence is to look for any unity behind the universe which might be like language (for which consciousness seems so necessary)—which parallels and symbolizes reality not by accident or chance, but because the universe works like language. It works like metaphor and analogy, and the Mandelbrot set or a fractal coastline are mathematical representations of this principle I have called the “Logos Echo”. Written language in a given book we might read has no meaning, NO LIFE, without the coherence originally installed in it by a consciousness, and later brought to life by a consciousness reading it. Consciousness is the source of the forms and meaning for a written language—the source of life BEFORE and AFTER in the construction and reading of a novel. LIFE and the universe it lives in are like this. We are reading the universe like some “2001 A Space Odyssey” monolith book lying in wait for billions of years. It seems so familiar because we resemble the author in our consciousness—we reconstruct God’s thoughts.