LOST and Consciousness

recently consumed

book: The Physics of Consciousness
tv: LOST “The Constant”

tasting notes

Wow. I am just going to come right out and say that this most recent episode of LOST was by far my favorite of the entire series, and that it had me bawling my eyes out at the end. Desmond is the coolest character, a sexy time travelling Scotsman who is so deeply in love with Penny that he is willing to travel to the ends of Earth and time to be with her. Man, that really shows how trivial the whole Jack/Kate/Sawyer love triangle is.

Besides watching that amazing episode yesterday, I also finished a book called the The Physics of Consciousness by Evan Harris Walker. The book is about consciousness as one of the underlying forces in the universe similar to gravity and seeks to prove it by looking on the quantum level. The theory goes that the observer plays an essential part in the universe, that consciousness itself causes the wavefunction collapse. In less scientific terms, the microscopic universe is based on probabilities (like that an electron can be here or there, or bounce around in between) and that it is the act of observing (like by experiment) that causes it to become something. And, since our conscious observation of the system determines the final outcome, that consciousness itself must be an important, if not the most important, part of the system.

The book seeks to answer one of the most important questions of the human existence… does matter exist because of the mind? Or does the mind exist because of matter? Materialists believe that mind creating matter is just a bunch of pseudo-science New Age hocus pocus, while Walter sees the materialists viewpoint as failing to explain that which makes us human. Why should we as humans love or think or feel this deeply if it is just neurons firing in our brain? He believes that through experiment and physics, he can prove that matter is the illusion, not mind.

While I didn’t agree with everything Walker concluded, I found myself satisfied with how it bridged Eastern philosophies about the interconnectedness of all things with the very fabric of the human brain. And after watching that last episode of LOST, I was amazed at how this book gave me a new perspective on the mysteries of the series. So here goes my interpretation of some of the island’s events based on the nerdiness that is the quantum mind.

CONSCIOUSNESS + TIME
“Time does not flow as a stream but passes by as chunks… In addition to physical, biological, and psychological time, there is also consciousness time, the time we experience. This time has its own role to play in reality…”

If time is merely a series of “snapshots” taken by our consciousness which is continually present, then it could be possible to go backward and forward in that series. It is time travel of the mind, just like Desmond experienced. Desmond’s consciousness was bounced to other periods in his temporal experience, and thus the body container his mind was previously in would go unconscious during the jump.

The fact that Desmond’s consciousness bounced around was pretty straight-forward in the episode, but I got a new level of enjoyment out of it because of the book. My deeper nerdy theory is that the mind is like an electron, and when excited by something like electromagnetism or radiation, it can bounce into a different orbit or in the mind’s case a different period in time.

WILL VS. CONSCIOUSNESS
“The will is the channel that determines what our next move, choice, and thought will be. It selects the path our mind takes through the images of things the brain scatters before us… We are saying that our mind can affect matter - even other brains - and that distant matter and minds can have an effect on us… Why does it seem so strange? Because the signal (will) is small compared to the noise of our everyday consciousness.”

Walker suggests that the bandwidth and resolution of consciousness (number of bits of information coming into our head) is much greater than the bitrate of our “will”. What we are concentrating on and thinking is only a piece of all the sensory input coming into our mind. Because of this, the world is mostly what we observe and only a small portion of what we will it to be.

In the world of LOST, maybe there are people… special people (ahem, Walt) who have a greater strength “will” than most. Maybe this is why he can cause birds to die and the dice to always roll a 6. Maybe because of this he has some ability to manipulate matter and project his consciousness in a visual way to people like Shannon and Locke.

Locke, being the more spiritual force on the island, has also been called “special”. Maybe his “healing” had more to do with the island empowering his will rather than it actually physically effecting him. Locke also seems to be able to gain insight, to slip into some higher level of consciousness by way of meditation.

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS
“The will is our innermost nature, our being that is there even when the things we might see go blank. It may even be there when all else is gone… It is perhaps this aspect of the mind that comes to fore when one is in deep meditation, a state of consciousness designed to remove thoughts and sensory contact with the world.”

Many have suggested “collective consciousness” before as part of LOST, and I have dismissed it as too much spiritual mumbo jumbo in what I thought was a mainly sci-fi series. However, I am giving the idea more validity now that I see that it could explain a lot of the harder to explain aspects of the island… smoke monster, zombie dad, the whispers, etc.

If there is something of ourselves that indeed survives after death, this could explain why we occasionally see Yemi and Christian Shepard just wondering around the island. Something of their unique selves is left, but they have also returned to the collected stream of consciousness, the more unified energy that exists outside the containers of our brains. The whispers are the collective consciousness, the cosmic mind if you will. And perhaps there are some exceptionally strong “wills” in the bunch that while dead in the physical world, are trying to continue their efforts from the non-physical world consciousness. Maybe the smoke monster is some man-created “security system” that tried to tap into the power of the collected consciousness, but has since gone haywire (we all know what awareness and smart machines can lead to).

THE GRAND UNIFIED THEORY
All this consciousness stuff still fails to explain things like the Orchid video, where two of the same bunny end up in the same space at the same time, perhaps as the result of a wormhole or vile vortices? Whatever the case, there is a lot in LOST that still suggests that perhaps physical people, and not just consciousness, can skip around in space and time. I’m looking at you Richard Alpert.

Until someone can present a theory that explains both the physical and mental displacement in time and space, I think there is going to be a lot of LOST that still remains a big mystery.

suggested pairings

• Lostpedia entries on “The Constant”, vile vortices, and time travel
• Slashdot’s review of the Physics of Consciousness by Evan Harris Walker