The Mystery

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions — sights, sounds, textures, tastes — are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it — or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion — we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like. Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to

Holonomic brain theory, also known as 'The Holographic Brain', is a branch of neuroscience investigating the idea that human consciousness is formed by quantum effects in or between brain cells. This is opposed by traditional neuroscience, which investigates the brain's behavior by looking at patterns of neurons and the surrounding chemistry, and which assumes that any quantum effects will not be significant at this scale. The entire field of quantum consciousness is often criticized as pseudoscience. This specific theory of quantum consciousness was developed by neuroscientist Karl Pribram initially in collaboration with physicist David Bohm building on the initial theories of holograms originally formulated by Dennis Gabor. It describes human cognition by modeling the brain as a holographic storage network. Pribram suggests these processes involve electric oscillations in the brain's fine-fibered dendritic webs, which are different from the more commonly known action

In philosophy of mind, panpsychism is the view that mind or a mindlike aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. It is also described as a theory that 'the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe'. It is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers including Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and Galen Strawson. In the 19th century, panpsychism was the default philosophy of mind in Western thought, but it saw a decline in the mid-20th century with the rise of logical positivism. Recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness has revived interest in panpsychism. Panpsychists posit that the type of mentality we know through our own experience is present, in some form, in a wide range of natural bodies. This notion has taken on a wide variety of forms. Some historical and non-Western panpsychists ascribe attributes such as life or

Less than a century ago, humanity’s cosmological picture underwent an unprecedented expansion when the astronomer Edwin Hubble revealed to the world that the Milky Way is far from the only galaxy in existence. It suddenly became apparent that the cosmic horizon spanned unimaginable distances in every direction, and in which our home galaxy, -a spiral of some two hundred billion stars, was just one in a sea of two trillion others. In this moment, humans opened their eyes to a new appreciation of the scales and immensities of the cosmos. The last century has been a time of incredible human discovery, and in which the field of cosmology has acquired new scientific status. Among other feats, scientists can now determine the elemental compositions of distant stars, and the trajectories of galaxies in relation to our own. They have gained insight into the birth and death of stars and planets, as well as the fabric of space and time. In this new understanding, our universe appears to us as ne

‘Dark Mysteries’ explores the subject of dark matter, one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s most fascinating discoveries. In 1998, when Hubble observed supernovae found at the edge of the universe, its observations showed that contrary to commonly held theories at the time, the expansion of the universe is not slowing down, but is actually accelerating at a rapid rate. The existence of dark matter and dark energy is one possible theory that was created to explain the acceleration of the universe. Dark matter is theorized to be a sort of energy-fluid that, along with dark energy, comprises more than 95% of the entire universe. In addition, because of how dark matter has been observed indirectly through the formation of galaxy clusters, we know that dark matter dictates the structure of the formation of the universe itself. The concept of an invisible force that completely surrounds us and is responsible for everything we know is an incredibly profound idea to Daniel Despins, and he hopes