Is matter conscious or aware?

“A single consciousness, an all-encompassing wisdom, pervades the universe. The discoveries of science, those that search the quantum nature of subatomic matter, those that explore the molecular complexity of biology, and those that probe the brain/mind interface, have moved us to the brink of a startling realization; all existence is the expression of this wisdom.

“In the laboratories, we experience it as information first physically articulated as energy and then condensed into the form of matter. Every particle, every being, from atom to human, appears to have within it a level of information, of conscious wisdom.” (Gerald L Schroeder PhD (MIT), The Hidden Face of God)

The puzzle we must now confront is this: Where does this germinal information arise? There is no hint of it in the laws of nature that govern the interactions among the basic particles that compose all matter. The information just appears as a given, with no causal agent evident, as if it were an intrinsic facet of nature.

It took science millennia before an Einstein discovered that, bizarre as it may seem, the basis of matter is energy, that matter is actually condensed energy (E = m.c²). It might take science quite a while longer to discover that there is some non-thing even more fundamental than energy that forms the basis of energy.

The physicist and the first American involved in the theoretical development of the atomic bomb, John Archibald Wheeler (1911- ), likened what underlies all existence to an idea, the ‘bit’ (the binary digit) of information that gives rise to the ‘it’, the substance of matter.

Secular science (or Positivism) busy itself with the investigation of matter/energy and the physical universe as perceived trough the five senses. It affirms that by a study of physical phenomena we are able to approach the world, as it really is, i.e. the things-in-themselves. Positivism is that system, which affirms that comprehension is only a name for a certain series of biological and chemical changes occurring in certain of the contents of our material brains, and that by an investigation of things, as they appear to be we can come to an understanding of their causes, i.e. what they really are.

David Hume (1711-1776), a British historian and philosopher, asserted that human knowledge comes only from sense experience. Hume’s philosophies influenced Auguste Comte, the father of positivism. Hume was the first post-medieval philosopher to reformulate the scepticism of the ancient Greeks.

Positivism was a doctrine and movement founded by French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who was also known as the founder of sociology. Comte contended that sense perceptions are the only admissible basis of human knowledge. He claimed that the only facts were those based on the ‘positive’ data of experience, and that beyond the world of fact there existed only logic and mathematics. The Positivists were worldly and secular – they rejected both theology and metaphysics. Positivism later went through several stages including Empiricism and Analytic and Linguistic philosophy.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), British philosopher and sociologist, saw the problem with Positivism, but tried to gloss it over and to bury it beneath the ponderousness of his erudition.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher who argued that reason is the means by which the phenomena of experience are translated into understanding. He believed that whatever is demanded by reason must be demanded of all rational beings; thus, rational action cannot be based on an individual’s personal wants, but must be action in accordance with something akin to a universal law. Kant formulated his critical philosophy in direct reaction to Hume.

Transcendentalism is a philosophy associated with Kant, which postulates that the individual must transcend empiricism (the idea that knowledge can only be gained through the physical senses), in order to discover the a priori principles of all knowledge – knowledge that is independent of all specific experiences.

Idealism, in contrast to Positivism and Transcendentalism, is any view that stresses the central role of the ideal (the spiritual) in the interpretation of experience. It may hold that the world, or reality, exists essentially as spirit or consciousness, that abstractions and laws are more fundamental in reality than sensory things, or, at least, that whatever exists is known in dimensions that are chiefly mental – through and as ideas. The two basic forms of Idealism are metaphysical Idealism and epistemological Idealism.

The contrary philosophical argument of the idealistic schools is that in studying the laws of nature, we only study the laws of our own minds (and brains). Therefore, it would be quite simple to demonstrate that, after all, we really attach very little meaning to such ideas as matter, motion, and mass, etc., other than a purely idealistic one; that they are merely phases of our thought.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was a French philosopher and writer whose widely influential works advocated the importance of intuition as a means of obtaining knowledge and the vital life force (which he termed élan vital) present in all living things. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927.

The British physicist, mathematician, and astronomer, Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), has also observed that, “the ultimate elements in a theory of the world must be of a nature impossible to define in terms recognisable to the mind”.

A more recent statement by one who is considered an excellent exponent of modern scientific opinion is found in What Dare I Think (1931) by the British biologist and philosopher, Julian Huxley (1887-1975), “There is no reason why the universe is perfect; there is indeed, no reason why it should be rational”.

According to the Bible, intelligent design, even at the level of the Divine, is not necessarily perfect design! We can already see this fact by the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as well as the sad feature of reality when Abel (who found favour in God’s eyes) was murdered by his brother Cain!

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher who suggested that truth is reached by a continuing dialectic that evolves in three stages, (1) by stating a theory (e.g. Creationism), (2) by then developing a theory that contradicts the first theory (e.g. neo-Darwinism), and finally (3) by integrating and resolving them into a coherent synthesis (e.g. Intelligent Design [?]).

Hegel criticised both the rational school of thought denigrating religion and the school of Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who elevated religious feeling above all else. Hegel with his philosophy chose a middle of the road approach.

Hegel was the last of the great philosophical system builders of modern times. His work, following upon that of Kant, Fichte, and Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), thus marks the pinnacle of classical German philosophy. As an absolute Idealist inspired by Christian insights and grounded in his mastery of a fantastic fund of concrete knowledge, Hegel found a place for everything – logical, natural, human, and divine – in his dialectical scheme that repeatedly swung from thesis to antithesis and back again to a higher and richer synthesis.

The position developed in the work on freedom, forms the basis of Schelling’s later philosophy, covering the time from 1810 until his death, which is known only through a draft of an unpublished work and through the manuscripts of his later lectures.

In this work, Schelling wanted to narrate the history of God. God, who originally is absorbed in a quiet longing, comes to Itself by glimpsing in Itself ideas through which he becomes conscious of Itself. This self-consciousness, which is identical to freedom, enables God to project these ideas from Itself – i.e., to create the world.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) was a German philosopher and one of the great transcendental idealists, who were influenced by the philosophy of Kant. Attracted by the trend of Romanticism, he eventually came to believe that religious faith surpassed moral reason. Fichte’s notion of the moral order of the cosmos and the moral character of societies was an important influence on Hegel.

Mystics generally begin from a still more absolute point of view than that of the philosophers, arguing that the whole philosophical controversy is a purely verbal one, for all such ontological propositions can, with a little ingenuity, change to one form to another. There is in consequence of this observation in the realm of modern philosophy what is frankly considered an uncompromising deadlock.

Mystics assert that reason is an inadequate instrument to the search of reality since its nature is essentially self-contradictory. Hume and Kant both saw this, but the one became a sceptic in the widest sense of the term, and with the other, the conclusion hid itself behind a verbose transcendentalism.

Mystics settles the dispute by laying a finger on the weak point of the positivists, “Also reason is a lie; for there is a factor infinite and unknown; and all their words are skew-wise.” (Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law, Chapter 2, verse 32.)

The universe cannot be explained by human reason alone; its nature is out of necessity irrational and subjective. As remarked by Bergson, “Our thought in its purely logical form is incapable of presenting the true nature of live” and the intellectual faculty is characterised by a “natural inability to comprehend life”.

“Atoms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the law of quantum mechanics.

“It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extend in every atom.

“The universe is also weird, with its laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God.

“God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.” (Freeman Dyson [1923- ], upon receiving the Templeton Prize.)

Purely intellectual knowledge (awareness) moves round its object and studies it from a distance, like food held in the palm of the hand. Whereas intuitive understanding (consciousness), when correctly applied, embraces, and absorbs what is to be known, like food that is digested and absorbed into the body.

Therefore, considering all the above and some more, I now make an irrational and subjective decision in what can only be labelled as intuitive logic, the following conclusions, namely:

• Life = Spirit + Mind + Body/Universe (Physical = Matter/Energy)


• Spirit = Mind + Body/Universe,


• Body & Brain/Universe = Hardware


• Spirit/Mind = Software [Programs (algorithms) + Data = Information]

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