Is Consciousness A Fundamental and Emergent Element of Reality?

By Michael and James Hall — authors of the popular Audible book "The Sword of Damocles: Our Nuclear Age."

jameshall042999@gmail.com

If consciousness is fundamental, it would change how we understand mind, matter, and the laws that govern them.

Treating consciousness as a fundamental force of nature is a provocative hypothesis, but it is not supported by current physics. The idea that consciousness is central to reality is primarily a philosophical proposal—often discussed under the label panpsychism. It currently lacks an accepted physical mechanism or reproducible empirical evidence.

So maybe the world is flat and the Earth is the center of the universe. We must never the less speculate the impossible.

Quantum theory provides a tempting place to do just that and explore the question. In quantum mechanics, the microscopic world that underlies everyday objects is described by wavefunctions. A wavefunction encodes probabilities, so a particle can exist in a superposition—a combination of multiple possible states at once—until something interacts with it.

When we measure or interact with the system, one definite outcome appears, as if the wavefunction has “collapsed” into a single possibility.

Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner once suggested that consciousness might play a role in this collapse, proposing that conscious observation helps bring about the definite reality we experience. He later moved away from a literal “consciousness‑causes‑collapse” view as other explanations, such as decoherence, were developed.

In 1939 Fritz London and Edmond Bauer argued that the observer’s consciousness is important for measurement, framing quantum mechanics in terms of knowledge and experience rather than only objective states.

John von Neumann highlighted the role of subjective perception in the measurement chain.

Max Planck went further in a philosophical vein, famously suggesting that consciousness is primary and that matter may be derivative from it.

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.”
Max Planck, The Observer, 25 January 1931.

If consciousness were shown to be fundamental, we would then need to ask whether individual minds cause local collapses or whether a single, universal consciousness plays a determining role. Demonstrating any of this would require clear, operational definitions of consciousness and collapse, a plausible mechanism linking mental states to physical variables, and reproducible experiments that rule out conventional explanations.

Highly respected mathematician and Nobel laureate Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff proposed a quantum‑based account of consciousness. Their Orch‑OR idea suggests that consciousness may emerge from quantum processes in microtubules inside neurons, with each conscious moment tied to a gravitationally induced collapse of quantum superpositions.1 Others, however, feel intuitively that consciousness extends beyond the brain, or that the brain functions less like a transmitter and more like a receiver or switchboard for a broader, possibly universal, field of mind.2

The big question is: assuming consciousness is a fundamental reality, then is it emergent from some greater plain? Thinkers have proposed that a greater, cosmic plane could give rise to consciousness as an emergent force. This idea is most often discussed today under the label cosmopsychism, a view that treats the universe itself as having psychological properties from which individual minds derive.

This idea has deep roots and contemporary supporters. Variants appear in ancient Vedantic and other metaphysical traditions that treat ultimate reality as a unified conscious ground. In Western thought it echoes Spinoza’s notion of God‑or‑Nature and Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious, and it has also surfaced in modern speculative physics and philosophy such as John Wheeler’s participatory universe and several recent philosophical defenses.

1-Hameroff S., Penrose R., “Consciousness in the universe: A review of the Orch‑OR theory,” Physics of Life Reviews 11 (2014): 39–78; and Hagan S., Hameroff S., Tuszyński J. A., “Quantum Computation in Brain Microtubules? Decoherence and Biological Feasibility,” arXiv:quant‑ph/0005025 (2000).

2-The “brain as receiver” or “mind‑at‑large” idea was popularized by Aldous Huxley, who described the brain as a “reducing valve” that filters a broader field of consciousness; Huxley developed this notion in The Doors of Perception and related essays, often citing earlier philosophical sources.