It’s just an idea. Don’t have a cow! — We have been thinking of gravity as either a force of nature or as the shape of space itself (General Relativity). As a force of nature, however, gravity should have a messenger particle while, to the latter, tiny spaces do not comply with GR in the way that large spaces…

In order to qualify, shouldn’t an “observer” have a specific awareness, or understanding of the experiment at hand (whether it be Schrodinger’s cat, the double slit, etc.)? I’m not sure that a cat, a vial of poison, or a detector could observe or collapse anything . . . but I do suspect that these things, like most objects, are regularly collapsed by means of Probability. In this way, Probability is a kind of “observer.” That is, Probability really exists (with or without the existence of humans), it’s the specific idea of how things collapse (evolve) in each moment, any idea is an awareness in the truest sense, so could Probability itself be a specific awareness necessary to collapse an object?

Why can’t the dark matter be the tiny grains of a quantized, background-dependent space? Grain size would vary; smaller in regions where matter is dense and larger where it is sparse. Wouldn’t this explain the strange rotation curve of spiral galaxies as well as the distortions of gravitational lensing (see link)? The dark matter is undetectable simply because the grains consist of unmeasured space-time properties with only one measured (discrete) property of volume—not enough for detection.

Thanks for your excellent presentation, though, it seems (many?) physicalists think consciousness is a physical effect. Wouldn’t that make the semantic problem you present go away? But going further, I suspect that consciousness is actually an abstract effect . . . and that true abstraction cannot emerge from a physical thing. If so, is the “hard problem” actually an impossible problem? TMI for here but, if interested, you can peruse an unfortunately dense (but short!) summary of this idea under my name here in Medium—the one about consciousness.

Hello Deepak, and thanks for another great article. Though we may never know WHAT the abstraction of consciousness is, we should be able to evolve a satisfying and scientifically compliant description of HOW an immaterial reality interacts with a material brain. I think we can learn something useful about the process through possibilities offered by quantized space, non-locality, and the observer effect— space-time “clues” to the workings of an abstract entity and the experiential process. (more on this …)

Hi Gerald, As I mentioned, Orch OR is a materialist theory which employs microtubules (MT’s) differently and is unrelated to my idea of a truly abstract consciousness. Though I am sure the MT activity described by Orch OR is correct, my interest is in the space-time evolution of MT’s in…

Something for everyone! — For just the next few minutes, think of consciousness as an immaterial reality, an abstraction. This notion relies upon the more primary idea that space comes in bits; a quantized space in which tiny grains of space are set within a background that’s neither spacial nor temporal.¹ These same immaterial…

"Science" is derived from Latin, scire, "to know" (tenets and understandigs based upon repeatable experiment) . . . thereby distinguishing science from religion other methods of understanding whose tenets may be based upon faith and belief.

Calm down, it’s just an idea — Our current description of dark matter relies upon a mysterious gravitational source to explain the strangest of observations. One of these observations is the block-like rotation of spiral galaxies and the terrific speed of their outer arms — often superluminal — whose starry members remain somehow attached when they should…