More thoughts on Consciousness and where it comes from... from a novice perspective

Last night I watched an interesting Ri lecture on Quantum Fields. The topic was Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe given by Dr. David Tong, a theoretical physicist from the University of Cambridge. If you can a spare hour and are even remotely interested in learning how the universe works, give it a watch. In an hours time, he single handedly explains all of middle school and high school science in laymen terms to the point of having a basic understanding as to how we see the universe today. Had my middle school and high school teachers explained atoms, protons, electron, photons, etc. as he does, I would have had a much better understanding and more appreciation for all of this at an earlier age.

During his lecture, he dives into quantum fields and our current exploration into how this may be the way the universe is ‘built’. Somewhat scrapping the periodic table of elements as ‘the way we see the building blocks of the universe’, Tong elaborates on The Standard Model and how this is a more accurate way to view reality, at least we think so. Over the past few centuries, great minds such as Michael Faraday (who’s discoveries contributed to our understanding and usage of electromagnetism) and Albert Einstein (who’s ideas changed our understanding of gravity and spacetime) have pushed the limits on our understanding of how our reality is constructed. The Stand Model seems to be the most accurate way of doing so thus far, as far as we can tell.

As I have expressed before in my writings, I am but a novice knowledge seeker on a journey to explore consciousness. This journey has led me down many paths, none of which I expected and none of which have left me feeling any more secure in finding an answer. Tong’s lecture led me down yet another path of questions and I intend to follow it further. Here are a few thoughts I had.

Tong shows us that according to Quantum Field Theory (QFT), the universe is made up of different fields that are spread all throughout the universe, for example the electromagnetic field. “Faraday taught us, and Maxwell later, that waves of the electromagnetic field are what we call light. But when you apply quantum mechanics to this, you find that these light waves aren’t as smooth and continuous as they appear. So if you look closely at light waves, you’ll find they are made of particles, the photon. The magic of this idea is that that same principle applies to every single particle in the universe. So, there is spread everywhere throughout this room something that we call the electron field. It’s like a fluid that fills this room and in fact fills the entire universe. And the ripples of this fluid, that waves of this fluid, get tied into little bundles of energy by the rules of quantum mechanics, and those bundles of energy are what we call the electron. All the electrons in your body are not fundamental, all the electrons in your body are waves of the same underlying field. We are all connected to each other.” Tong goes to to explain this is the same for other fields, meaning there are two quark fields which give rise to the up quark and the down quark as we call them and so on. So this made me think, could there be a field that is producing some tied up bundle of energy that when it interacts with the neurons in our brain, it gives rise to consciousness? This could be a novice incorrect question to ask and perhaps this had already been shown to be impossible. I am currently diving into the inter webs in search for answers. I am buried under 13+ books right now as I continue to try and write my thesis paper, so perhaps the answer lies in one I have not gotten to yet. Let the journey continue.

https://youtu.be/zNVQfWC_evg