Creator's Universe

This is a picture of the oldest handprint ever discovered. The image you see above shows the oldest handprint ever discovered. Did you notice anything weird? Well, you're only seeing a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. What if I told you that you could see the entire spectrum, not just visible light? What if your body doesn't actually show you the full picture of reality? It only gives you a filtered version of it. It's only showing you a filtered transmission of it.

What many philosophers and physicists argue is that the experience of what we call life, the actual feeling of seeing blue, of tasting salt, of the bitter taste of coffee, doesn't all live in your neurons. It lives in something called a conscious quantum field, operating from outside of space and time altogether.

Recently, in 2022, Italian-American physicist Federico Faggin and quantum theorist Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano published a paper entitled Hard Problem and Free Will: An Information-Theoretical Approach. They tried to solve what philosophers call the hard problem of consciousness. This is a term first coined by philosopher David Chalmers in 1995. The hard problem is simply asking: why does physical activity in the brain produce subjective experience?

Like, why does it feel like something to see red, to hear music, to be you? Because we can map the neurons in the brain, and we can trace the electrical signals that correspond to each activity. But nowhere in that wiring diagram does the feeling of being alive actually show up. To put it simply, the map describes the machinery, but it says nothing about the experience of running it.

Faggin's answer was to flip the entire picture around. He argued that conscious experience, or what philosophers call qualia, doesn't originate in the brain at all. The brain ONLY receives it. In their model, it comes from a place called a conscious quantum field. It is a field that exists outside of space and time, and that your body simply tunes into.

The feeling of seeing red, the bitterness of coffee, the sense of being you right now, none of that is manufactured by your neurons. Your neurons are just the receiver. The experience itself lives in the field.

Imagine a writer sitting at a desk, working on a novel. Inside the novel is a character, Doctor Maya. Whatever the author writes becomes a reality in Maya's world. She goes to work and runs a bunch of lab experiments. One night she stops, looks up at the sky, and for the first time in her life, a question crosses her mind.

Where did all of this come from? But here's the thing. No matter how hard Maya thinks, no matter how many experiments she runs in her world, she's never going to find the real answer. Because the answer isn't in the story. You see, it's the writer. A person sitting in a completely different realm, in a completely different reality, typing words through a keyboard.

Maya can't hear the keys clacking. She can't hear the writer breathing. From where she stands, the writer doesn't exist. The entire idea of someone writing your reality is outside the boundaries of what her universe allows her to know. And yet, without the writer, Maya isn't real at all.

And so, when we ask where the universe came from, the standard answer is the Big Bang. About 13.8 billion years ago, everything we know, every galaxy, every atom, and every cell in your body, was compressed into a point smaller than the head of a pin. Then it expanded. And then here we are.

But the next question is... What came before the Big Bang? What existed before existence itself?

We explore the idea in much greater detail in the full video, where we unpack some of the bigger questions surrounding it. You can watch the full video through the link below.