The Mystery

Our universe seems fine-tuned for life, with the constants of physical laws having to be within tight boundaries. Does this mean that the universe has a goal of consciousness? Is there a directedness of the universe toward consciousness? Is consciousness entirely contingent or is it something special, even a ultimate object of universal development? Leonard Susskind is an American physicist, who is a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an associate member of the faculty of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a distinguished professor of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. Susskind is widely regarded as one of the fathers of string theory. He was

Biologist Gerald Edelman (1929-2014) was born in America. His early work concentrated on the study of immunology and he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1972 for his work leading to the understanding of the antibody’s chemical structure. Where in the brain does consciousness lie? Ah, well, that's of course a mistake that's made broadly by people who've entered into the field in thinking that there are consciousness neurons, whether the consciousness is here rather than there. Consciousness, as [William Bo] James pointed out, is a process not a thing. And it's a dynamic process according to this idea of the dynamic core, which means a huge number of events all over in this re-entrant circuitry and, because it's degenerate, never even for the same experience, twice the same set of events. So the question is essentially in a way meaningless. Yes, it's happening in the brain – that makes me what's called an internalist – and I don

Masaru Emoto was a Japanese businessman, author and pseudo-scientist who claimed that human consciousness could affect the molecular structure of water. His 2004 book 'The Hidden Messages in Water' was a New York Times best seller. His conjecture evolved over the years, and his early work revolved around pseudo-scientific hypotheses that water could react to positive thoughts and words and that polluted water could be cleaned through prayer and positive visualization. Emoto said that water was a 'blueprint for our reality' and that emotional 'energies' and 'vibrations' could change its physical structure. His water crystal experiments consisted of exposing water in glasses to various words, pictures, or music, then freezing it and examining the ice crystals' aesthetic properties with microscopic photography. He claimed that water exposed to positive speech and thoughts created visually 'pleasing' ice crystals, and that negative intentions yie

There is a current view that consciousness is something which arises from some complicated computation. So we have our computers, and people think that because they can do things amazingly fast, and they can calculate very quickly, and they can play chess extremely well, that they are superior to us even, and it is only some complicated aspect of this computational activity that somehow consciousness arises from that. Now my view is quite different from this. I think there is a lot of computational activity going on in the brain, but this is basically unconscious. So consciousness seems to me to be something quite different. Sir Roger Penrose. Quantum Consciousness Theorist — Co-creator of the Orch OR model of the quantum nature of consciousness and memory. Knighted in 1994 for his contributions to science, Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS, is an English mathematical physicist, mathematician and philosopher. The extraordinary scope of his work ranges from quantum physics and theories of human