The nature of consciousness remains elusive. Many have attempted to describe it in words, yet it resists precise definition and lacks any definitive explanation. While considerable progress has been made in AI (Artificial Intelligence), it remains an open question whether machines will ever demonstrate genuine self-awareness, desire, or emotion in any recognisably human sense.

The human brain — grey matter — is generally considered the seat of consciousness. After all, if it is damaged, cognition may falter or cease altogether, sometimes with fatal consequences. But could this view be too simplistic? If a television is damaged, for example, it may function poorly or fail entirely, yet this does not affect the broadcast itself, which continues to exist independently on the airwaves. By analogy, some have suggested that human consciousness may reside remotely from its transceiver — the brain. Unsurprisingly, this is a deeply contentious idea, not least because it is often labelled “spiritual”. Strictly speaking, however, spiritual need only mean non-physical.

This line of thought is often described as mind–body dualism: the view that mental phenomena can appear non-physical, and that mind and body may be distinct and separable. Yet there may be another way of framing the apparent dilemma. As the late comedian Bill Hicks quipped, perhaps matter and consciousness are simply different vibrations of the same underlying reality. Even in such heavy territory, a little humour can be illuminating.

Comparable uncertainties exist in physics itself. Is electricity a wave or a particle? What, precisely, is gravity? Isaac Newton freely admitted that he did not understand the mechanism behind gravitational attraction. Later descriptions, such as gravity as the curvature of spacetime, remain largely descriptive rather than explanatory — and highly abstract.

It is also worth noting that many leading scientists of earlier eras took a serious interest in fields now dismissed as “occult”. Newton, for example, devoted enormous effort to alchemy, sacred geometry, and esoteric theology. It would therefore be misleading to portray him — or science more broadly — as having been shaped exclusively by rigid materialism.

"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves ... Heres Tom with the Weather." Bill Hicks

Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes hypothesised that our current state of subjective consciousness — in the sense of introspective self-awareness — began to emerge around the second millennium BCE. You might say that we are more self-ish today, both literally and metaphorically.

Prior to this, he proposed that human behaviour was governed largely by a group mentality, as if directed by a form of collective consciousness. Intriguingly, the timeframe Jaynes suggested for this breakdown of bicamerality roughly coincides with periods often discussed in catastrophist thought. Although Jaynes was not a catastrophist in any conventional sense, the parallels are nonetheless suggestive. Perhaps a different electrical or gravitational environment in the past may have supported a different state of mind. According to Jaynes, when the bicameral mind began to break down, the left hemisphere gained access to the right and mistook its own intuitive thoughts — previously unconscious — for the voices of gods, or God. He believed this framework could shed light on phenomena such as hypnosis and certain mental disorders, including schizophrenia. In this view, hearing voices represents a regression to an earlier mode of consciousness.

Talking of voices — if you will pardon the pun — when Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors arrived in South America, they were reportedly surprised to find that many indigenous peoples claimed to see and hear their statues speaking to them, quite literally. These statues often served as focal points for communal life. Similarly, when the heroes of the Iliad or figures in the Old Testament heard voices offering commands or guidance, Jaynes argued that these accounts were not metaphorical. They described actual auditory experiences.

There is some overlap between Jaynes’ work and that of psychiatrist Dr Iain McGilchrist, discussed below, although they diverge in important respects. McGilchrist argues that, if anything, humanity began losing contact with the right hemisphere during this period, rather than the left suddenly gaining access to it. He also points out that — contrary to popular belief — the left hemisphere tends to dominate during hypnosis and in schizophrenic episodes. McGilchrist’s conclusions benefit from decades of subsequent research, and it is also worth noting that there is little, if any, evidence for the existence of schizophrenia prior to the eighteenth century.

“Putting it at its simplest, where Jaynes interprets the voices of the gods as being due to the disconcerting effects of the opening of a door between the hemispheres so that the voices could for the first time be heard, I see them as being due to the closing of the door, so that the voices of intuition now appear distant, ‘other’, familiar but alien, wise but uncanny – in a word, divine.”
Iain McGilchrist, P 262, The Ancient World. The Master and His Emissary

In his 2009 book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, former psychiatrist Dr Iain McGilchrist raises challenging questions about the nature of consciousness and how we think today. Blinkered left hemisphere training, for example, can render students functionally blind to alternative ways of approaching problems. The left hemisphere tends to block out anything that does not fit with its preferred framework. As a result, many scientists, with narrow and highly specialised training, may fail to see what is obvious to a non-expert. McGilchrist argues that they will likely be among the last to recognise a paradigm shift while it is already underway.

“Our culture is becoming more autistic.”
Dr Iain McGilchrist

In popular culture, the left brain is typically portrayed as rational and linguistic, while the right brain is described as creative and emotional. Various metaphors reinforce this narrative — the left as the paint pot, the right as the painter. Forget everything you thought you knew. Although such generalisations contain a grain of truth, McGilchrist stresses that they are ultimately misleading. Both hemispheres are engaged in most activities, but they approach the world in reliably different ways. It is more accurate to say that they “pay attention in different ways.” As he puts it, “It’s not that they do different things, but that they do things differently.”

Furthermore, the notion that the left hemisphere is dull but reliable, like an old accountant friend, turns out to be false. In practice, the right hemisphere is less likely to jump to conclusions. It can hold opposing perspectives simultaneously and tolerate ambiguity. Distinguished neuroscientist Professor V. S. Ramachandran has described the right hemisphere as an effective devil’s advocate in this respect.

“It is only the left brain that thinks there is certainty to be found anywhere.”
Iain McGilchrist The Master and His Emissary. P 171, The Nature of the Two Worlds

McGilchrist also points out that the left hemisphere does possess emotions. However, these are typically associated with anger, intolerance, and disgust — tones that increasingly dominate public discourse, particularly on social media. Anger lateralises to the left hemisphere and reflects its tendency to frame reality in rigid, black-and-white terms. In the interview with Rebel Wisdom below, McGilchrist discusses the illiberal impulses of some who, ironically, describe themselves as liberal.

Based on decades of research, McGilchrist notes that people in the West tend to be more left-brained and reductive in their thinking, whereas people from Eastern cultures are generally better able to integrate both hemispheric perspectives — the Master and the Emissary. The left brain is more literal and inclined toward mechanistic fragmentation. The right brain, by contrast, puts the pieces together, recognising patterns, context, and meaning.

My 2023 Thunderblog aboout McGilchrist's work can be viewed here or at https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2023/10/15/losing-context-the-divided-brain-and-the-making-of-the-western-world/

Rupert Sheldrake has an impressive CV. He is a biologist and the author of more than eighty-five scientific papers and nine books, as well as co-author of six further volumes. He was listed among the top one hundred Global Thought Leaders for 2013 by the Duttweiler Institute in Zurich, Switzerland’s leading think tank. On ResearchGate, the largest academic network, his RG score of 33.5 places him within the top 7.5% of researchers worldwide, based on citations of peer-reviewed publications.

However, his pioneering research has placed him on a collision course with rigid materialist science. In 2013, his TED talk entitled The Science Delusion was removed from circulation, relegated to a corner of the TED website, and stamped with a formal warning label. Arrangements for further discussion were announced, but those who publicly condemned the talk failed to appear. The response was overwhelmingly critical, often from commentators unfamiliar with morphic resonance. Ironically, before its removal the video had attracted around thirty-five thousand views; since then, unofficial copies have amassed over five million views worldwide. It has also been dubbed into Russian and subtitled in more than twenty languages.

Sheldrake has taken a sustained interest in the nature of consciousness, psi phenomena, and memory in nature. He is perhaps best known for the latter — his controversial work on morphic resonance. That work resonates strongly with Electric Universe advocates, who view the cosmos as an interconnected dance of electrical particles rather than inert matter alone.

Here is the banned TED talk.

One of the more amusing moments in the talk concerns the so-called constants of physics — or, more precisely, their lack of constancy (at around the eleven-minute mark). This poses an awkward problem for consensus science. A constant, after all, ought to be constant. Yet measurements of G, the gravitational constant, vary enough that committees periodically average them to arrive at an agreed value. Similarly, variations in the measured speed of light, c, have been sidestepped by defining the metre in terms of the speed of light itself — meaning the unit changes with the quantity. Go figure.

In principle, these constants could now vary without our direct awareness. Rather than concealing this, Sheldrake jokes that it would be refreshing to publish a financial-style index of fluctuating physical constants, updated daily for public inspection.

From an Electric Universe perspective, such fluctuations are not especially surprising. Gravity, for example, is expected to vary with changes in the surrounding electrical environment.

“People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.”
Charles Fort

Self-styled skeptics often pride themselves on debunking claims that fail to align with their preferred worldview. There is clearly a livelihood to be made here, and some good may indeed result when genuine fraud is exposed. The problem arises when skepticism hardens into reflexive dismissal. Too often, non-standard and alternative theories are lumped together indiscriminately, regardless of evidence. As history shows, most new theories are attacked at birth. Many such disputes are well documented in Thomas Kuhn’s work on paradigm shifts. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular discourse.

Skepticism in its proper philosophical sense means doubting certainty. The posture described above, however, is better described as pseudo-skepticism. It is rarely difficult to impose an unreasonable burden of proof on new ideas, while accepting established theories by convention alone — even when those theories are themselves incomplete or strained. Conventional wisdom, as the saying goes, often owes at least as much to convention as it does to wisdom.

Many pseudo-skeptics focus their energies, in particular, on debunking belief in a God or gods. Arguments concerning a supreme being lie beyond the scope of this website. However, when it comes to the gods of myth and legend, there is another dimension that deserves serious consideration.

Mythologists such as David Talbott, Ev Cochrane, and Dwardu Cardona — all closely associated with Electric Universe research — look for patterns rather than dismissals. Across cultures, the gods of myth and legend are repeatedly associated with the planets Saturn, Mars, and Venus. Although these deities were feared, worshipped, and depicted in diverse ways, the points of agreement are striking. From a comparative mythology perspective, it is naive to dismiss these shared archetypes as mere superstition or ignorance. Humanity may be a storytelling species, but oral traditions worldwide prize continuity and fidelity — not embellishment. There is a larger picture to consider. See the mythology and catastrophism sections of this website.

Pseudo-skepticism — or one-way skepticism — is, in fact, a textbook example of the limited left-hemisphere thinking discussed earlier. Iain McGilchrist has repeatedly highlighted the blind spots and vulnerabilities of this mindset.

Skeptical About Skeptics has done valuable work exposing the motivations and tactics of several prominent so-called skeptics. The philosophical root of skepticism is doubt of certainty — yet many of today’s loudest skeptics display absolute certainty in their own worldview. Ironically, the aggressive atheism that typifies some of these figures often resembles the very dogmatic mentality they claim to oppose.

"I would like to put in a word for uncertainty. In the field of religion there are dogmatists of no-faith as there are of faith, and both seem to me closer to one another than those who try to keep the door open to possibilities beyond customary ways of thinking — possibilities we would have to discover painstakingly for ourselves. Certainty is the greatest of all illusions. Whatever form of fundamentalism it supports, whether religious or scientific, it is what the ancients meant by hubris. The only certainty, it seems to me, is that those who believe they are certainly right are certainly wrong."
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 460, Conclusion: The Master Betrayed

"Conventional wisdom usually owes at least as much to convention as wisdom."
David Drew

Life emits light. Michael Clarage, PhD — astrophysicist and Lead Scientist of SAFIRE — explains that organic life cannot exist without cells, chemistry, light, electricity, or the coupled ecosystems of the Earth and Sun. At every level of this hierarchy, energy is exchanged and information is communicated.

There is even evidence that our eyes emit light. To a physicist this is unsurprising, since all receivers are also potential transmitters — a radio antenna, for example, can both send and receive the same signal. Likewise, the rhodopsin molecules in retinal cells not only absorb visible light, but also emit it.