I often say that, “Look, scientific evidence for God is already here.” That’s given. Because so much evidence now exists in this, on so many diverse phenomena in psychology, in biology, in medicine. And physics, of course, has quantum measurement. So, we can rest that question aside. God is already proven scientifically, both in theory and experiment.

Welcome, kind viewers, to Science and Spirituality.

Dr. Goswami has been a professor of physics and a member of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon, USA since 1968. He is the author of 12 books, including a well regarded university textbook on quantum mechanics, and a series of popular physics and spirituality works, including “God is Not Dead,” and his latest, “Creative Evolution.”

Dr Goswami has also gained recognition by appearing in the popular 2004 documentary “What the Bleep Do We Know?” and the 2009 award-winning documentary, of which he is the subject, “The Quantum Activist.”

According to many spiritual traditions, God manifests as Universal Consciousness, a spiritual force that interconnects all sentient beings, and is the source of downward causation or the concept that processes at lower levels are bound by the laws of a higher level. But what is consciousness?

Can you close your eyes for a moment, and imagine your other senses are not functioning as well? With eyes closed, please try to answer the question: Does the world still exist even though you aren’t conscious of it? If your answer is yes, how do you know?

Well, there are highly respectable physicists who stretched their imagination and “did their math.” Believe it or not, their answer is “no.” They maintain that the universe, in order to exist, requires a conscious sentient being to be aware of it, and that, without an observer, it only exists as a possibility. One of these scientists is Dr. Amit Goswami.

SMTV (m): Today we’ll be discussing with our guest Amit Goswami, various aspects of spirituality and science related to quantum physics, namely a new paradigm shift, and we’ll be explaining what that shift is.

It seems that quantum physics is a perfect mathematical representation of reality around us; actually everything is quantum physics. And we have to deal with microscopic invisible particles like electrons, atoms, and molecules in order to understand our world.

But they behave very strangely. They can explore entire areas and be at the same time at different places, have different energies, have different momenta and most important, we cannot perceive them with our five senses. They only show one facet of their reality, like localized particles. We call it quantum measurement or observations.

Can you actually explain to our viewers what happens during these observations? And what actually is this quantum realm that they live in, why we cannot perceive it? And what is its relation to our physical world?

This is the most important question of quantum physics. Quantum physics says literally that objects are possibilities, and in possibilities they can be at two places, more than one place at the same time, which boggles our mind. But it's in possibility; that’s the key to understanding these objects. In possibility they can be in states of several different energies, several different momenta, several different positions, and that’s okay.

We sometimes call them “waves of possibilities.”

That’s the more accurate description, because the word “wave” brings in a technical aspect of this possibility. They are coherent super-positions. And the problem that quantum physics has is that material interactions can convert possibility only into more possibilities, but never can collapse the possibilities into an actuality.

In other words, how from the possibility wave (do) you get an actual localized particle? How is it that a many faceted object becomes a one faceted object? That is the mystery of quantum physics.

So the idea arose first from a mathematician, John von Newman, that it must be our looking that is doing this transition, and therefore if it is us, then our consciousness must have a non-material component. Our consciousness must be non-material to put it bluntly. Material interactions we know express by the exchange of energy. But the energy of the material universe alone is always a constant.

So how does then the material world interact with the non-material world which is outside of it? And the answer is that from the energy conservation law itself, it can’t. So scientists have been very skeptical of any kind of dualistic introduction of consciousness. The new paradigm shift is the idea that if consciousness is the ground of all being, reversing the usual scientific metaphysics that matter is the ground of all being and material objects are possibilities of this consciousness itself.

Then consciousness is choosing from its own possibilities, and no interaction, no signal is involved, signal-less communication, which in quantum physics we call non-locality, and that’s what makes the choice. So conscious choice, out of the many facets, is responsible for why we only observe one facet.

But in any observation, we have some kind of interaction with other objects, like detectors; Niels Bohr said that we don’t have any other choice, but we can only observe through experiments with classical instruments.

Niels Bohr was right, we need to amplify the sub-microscopic objects. They need to be amplified to the macroscopic before we can collapse them, before we can perceive them.

The brain plays a very interesting role. Eventually the brain sees itself as a subject, so consciousness identifies with the brain becomes the subject of the experience, and the object that is collapsed from its wave of possibility to the particle of actuality becomes the object of the experience. And this itself also is a paradox from the materialist point of view. Why? Because materialists posit that consciousness itself is composed of objects, but, interaction of objects can only produce an object.

Including energy which is also a material object.

Absolutely. So you can never get a subject out of object interactions of objects. This is the hard question of consciousness according to the philosopher David Chalmers.

So where does the feeling of subjectivity come from?

The feeling of subjectivity must come from the quantum measurement itself. There is a tangled hierarchy in the brain. A tangled hierarchy can be understood by examining a sentence like the liar’s paradox: “I am a liar” It’s the circular statement. If I am the liar, then I’m telling the truth; if I’m telling the truth, then I’m lying. So this continuing back and forth between the two levels of the hierarchy.

So that's the statement, which refers to itself.

Exactly. It’s a self-referential sentence, a circular measurement by a circular apparatus. An apparatus which has this tangled hierarchical circularity in it will always produce self-reference, and this is how the brain produces self- reference, and consciousness identifies with the brain.

But there are two elements necessary in perception, memory, in order to interpret perception, and the mechanism of receiving signals from outside reality. The reason why we feel separated from the object comes from the fact that we identify with our experience, with our memories, right?

Yes. Look at the way that you said it, perception requests memory, but memory requests perception, otherwise where would the memory come from? So this is the basic circularity.

We never know what’s first, right?

Exactly.

We will be right back to continue our fascinating talk with Dr. Amit Goswami. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Science and Spirituality. Today we are having an in-depth discussion regarding the notion of consciousness as the basis of all being, in a spiritual sense, with all processes at our level bound by laws of a higher level.

This idea helped Dr. Amit Goswami, a theoretical physicist and author, to bypass the major difficulties in understanding the quantum measurement problem in quantum physics, which was insurmountable assuming that everything is made of matter. The following conversation shows it is not so easy to step away from the logic of the materialistic worldview.

You said that the basic mechanism of what physicists call “collapsing of the wave” into the localized particle, is because it interacts with our consciousness. But do you have in mind Universal Consciousness?

Yes, it’s not separate from us. It’s universal interconnectedness among all sentient beings.

What about these waves of possibilities? Because if they are part of consciousness, that means the Universal Consciousness overlaps, or intercepts our physical space, because in a double slit experiment, we measure interference of these waves, in a physical space. If they are part of the Universal Consciousness that means that Universal Consciousness is around us also in physical space. It may have extra dimensions, but….

It is “in” and “around us,” the word that (is) used in spiritual tradition is very good – “transcendence.” Consciousness transcends; there is something that is a causation that is happening outside of space and time, space-time universe, but it can affect things inside the space-time universe. So it’s both in and out.

It’s better to talk to about these things, not in a straightforward fashion, but recognize the paradox from the get-go. It does not make logical sense in the sense we used, to say that something is both inside and outside. But that is what we have to posit.

Okay. But one thing is settled, that we measure those waves in physical space.

Therefore, Universal Consciousness has to be around us.

You went too fast and pulled a fast one. This is the point. The waves along with this Universal Consciousness, there the waves are possibilities of this Universal Consciousness. Space-time has not come up yet, space-time is part of the collapse…

Right. But nevertheless we see the interference pattern.

We never see the interference pattern until we have collected a whole bunch of objects. We can guess that that there is interference. These are not ordinary objects because they don’t fall in the expected places where ordinary Newtonian objects would have fallen. But only after we have collected many electrons falling on the screen we can tell that there is something peculiar about this object.

But we are never measuring a multi-faceted object. We are never measuring a wave in space and time. So these waves are possibility. (Werner) Heisenberg had it right; they reside in potentia, transcendent potentia. They don’t reside in the space-time universe.

If it’s inside and outside, it’s exactly what I said; that there is some intercept.

We can never get a clear description in terms of the descriptive language that we have without having some sort of uncertainty, some sort of difficulty in use of language.

Right, our mind with our memories basically interprets things within the mainframe of five senses; therefore we want to see it as a particle, therefore somehow it projects our methodology into the outer reality.

We projecting (our) habits into the reality.

Absolutely. So then our perception becomes clouded, influenced by our memories. And this is what produces, eventually, a way of perception that each of us have, that we call the ego, our character.

That’s right.

Is quantum consciousness the same as spiritual Universal Consciousness according to Eastern religions, (so) that it’s evidence of downward causation of God?

Yes. I think that it doesn’t matter what word or phrase you’re using to describe it. The perfect description of it is that it is the source of downward causation. It’s the source of causation which cannot be explained with material level of causation, with material interaction.

So what actually is that causation?

It’s somewhere in the upper worlds?

We should be very careful here. It’s not outside of us either. Ordinarily because of these memories that we talked about, we become identified with individuality that memories gives us. But if we can rise above the memories, there is that Universal Consciousness that we belong to. So every one of us are privileged to have this extraordinary or non-ordinary states of consciousness in which we are universal.

We sincerely thank Dr. Amit Goswami for participating in this insightful discussion and his extraordinary work towards bridging spiritual Universal Consciousness with the foundations of quantum physics.

Our appreciation, friendly viewers, for joining us today. Next up is Words of Wisdom, after Noteworthy News. May quantum consciousness keep you interconnected with the Divine.