THE MYSTERY OF EXISTENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS UNRAVELLED
A scientifically substantiated deduction and possible explanation of the origin and true nature of the ultimate reality and this seemingly infinite and meaningless universe with its incredible contents, mysterious consciousness, natural laws, counter-intuitive quantum phenomena, and senseless human suffering.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
What are the ultimate building blocks of this “something”?
How does/did the universe and consciousness, as we perceive it, come into being from these building blocks, and what is this mysterious consciousness?
What is the meaning of life?
Why is there suffering and death?
How can we achieve and increase happiness and well-being?
In the latter half of the twentieth century, theoretical and experimental evidence revealed that the universe is neither local nor real. These counter-intuitive phenomena suggest that physical distances between objects do not exist, and that the properties of objects remain indeterminate until they are measured or observed. This raised profound questions about the true nature of reality, prompting me to seek an explanation. I employed a bottom-up approach to initially ascertain the origin and nature of the ultimate reality, without allowing any prior hypothesises or assumptions to influence my thinking. The result was a hypothesis demonstrating the logical necessity of an uncaused ultimate reality, composed solely of an infinite collection of a single non-physical substance: uncertainty. This uncertainty manifests itself as information. The ultimate reality, composed solely of information, is the only existing reality: there is nothing else. The hypothesis explains consciousness as an inevitable self-caused phenomenon through the imaginary causal succession of different combinations of parts of this information similar to the successive frames of a movie. This phenomenon creates the illusion of ourselves and our universe (with all its contents) that we seem to live in. It also creates other illusory universes similar to, but fundamentally different from, the Many Worlds Interpretation -- one of the most well-known interpretations of quantum mechanics.
A good metaphor is to imagine that the ultimate (and only) reality is like an infinite block of granite. This block consists of an infinite number of granite molecules (the infinite information of my hypothesis). If we were to take a picture of our complete universe every picosecond (including everything it contains, including ourselves), we could represent each picture by a static set of certain pieces of these molecules, similar to a statue crafted by a sculptor. We can then sequence these statues in the correct order in our minds to give the impression of our universe unfolding in time, like the sequence of the frames in a movie. This process of imaginatively selecting the different statues and imaginatively putting them in a causal and logical order is what we call consciousness.
The hypothesis explains why we perceive our world/universe as causal, even though the behaviour of its smallest components appears to be non-causal. The hypothesis offers a possible explanation of quantum phenomena including wave-particle duality, superposition (non-reality), and quantum entanglement (non-locality) --some of the greatest mysteries in physics. The hypothesis offers a possible explanation of special and general relativity and appears to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics. Furthermore, the hypothesis explains why there is no free will as we understand it, why time is an illusion, why time travel is impossible, and why this illusory time seems to move forward (the arrow of time). The hypothesis provides an explanation and solace in this seemingly meaningless human existence, with its inherent injustice, suffering, and death.
I call my hypothesis the Many Paths Interpretation (MPI) as a reference to the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI).
Scientists & philosophers interested in reading the hypothesis and commenting on it can contact me via the contact form.
Publishers who wish to study the manuscript (220 pages) with a view to possible publication can contact me via the contact form.