There are many theories of consciousness. Most of these theories relate thoughts and consciousness to the brain but there always seems to be a hurdle. We can examine brain activity but what is thought? In this article I refer to the ants studying a pen and the concept of writing. What is the relationship between the meaning of what is written and writing itself? We can study the mechanics of speech that doesn’t mean you will understand what is said.
Consciousness is a unique process that belongs solely to the individual having it. It is really impossible to study in a scientific way because the basis of science assumes that there is an objective world that we study, but consciousness doesn’t seem to belong to that objective world. Scientists instead study the brain but this is not the same as the process of thinking or being conscious. It’s like studying printing in order to understand a book.
So what is consciousness? This process that seems to defy physics? When we die consciousness finishes (at least in the form that we know it). If there is life after death and consciousness continues then we are back to the question of what is consciousness?
I propose here a new theory of consciousness.
In a previous article I have shown how it is possible to jump through a dimension without by moving through the next dimension. As an example I pointed out that you can draw a line on a sheet of paper (a two dimensional surface) to get from A to B or you can lift the pen up off the paper (into the third dimension) and put it back down. The gap in the line was where the pen travelled in the third dimension. Similarly, we can be in two places by travelling in time. I can be in one place at one time and another at a different time.
In order to move through both space and time in this way, we would have to travel through a fifth dimension. It would be like picking ups a book and reading it at one place then skipping forward or backward and seeing how the plot pans out or what led up to the situation. A computer can’t do this. All the computer can do is make predictions based on algorithms that have been programmed into it. These algorithms may be very complicated, they may even be able to modify themselves (and this is called ‘artificial intelligence’), but they can’t escape the programming.
The only thing in the universe that can travel backwards and (for most people, in a different way) forwards in time is thought or consciousness. Not only can we can relive events from the past (albeit in subjective way), we can create completely imaginary scenarios in our mind. Authors do this all the time but everyone does it to some extent. We also do this in our dreams where we create complete worlds sometimes colourful and involving all the senses.
So, logically, thoughts and consciousness (which have spacial and time components) must exist in a dimension beyond the four dimensions we are familiar with. Consciousness must exist in the fifth (or higher) dimension. This is why we have dualism — the mind, body paradox and why the mind is so difficult to understand. It doesn’t exist in our four dimensional universe.
It’s worth considering how different the time dimension is from the three physical dimensions. Consciousness is different to all these dimensions. The brain is a system that enables fifth dimensional reality to manifest in our four dimensional universe. A metaphor is an analogue clock that manifests four dimensional time in our three dimensional world through movement of hands.
We should also distinguish between thoughts and consciousness. Thoughts are the creation of worlds in our minds, however confusing these worlds are. Thoughts have time and space components to them. Consciousness is outside of time and space. It is like the point that I refer to in this article. Awareness is not the same as thinking, something that current theories of consciousness seem to ignore.
We saw here that the fifth dimension could be called entropy, the degree of order, and that intelligence is the ability to perceive order. So we can see that thoughts can be of high entropy and very disordered, or of lower entropy and become more ordered. The purpose of our existence is to lower entropy, to become more ordered. Our time on Earth is simply a stop on this journey. We came from beyond this four dimensional universe and when we die we go to a universe that is beyond our comprehension as four dimensional beings.
The ultimate state is to move from the fifth dimension (which we could call thoughts) to the state of being outside of dimensions, a singularity — the point from which other dimensions are made from. This is consciousness and when you reach this state you can travel freely, not only in space and time, but beyond the four dimensions that we are usually aware of.
See also The Two Universes and A new Approach to the Consciousness-Mind-Body Problem.