This thesis addresses the mystery of consciousness and the perceived lack of meaning in science, exploring how these themes are intertwined. It investigates whether consciousness is best understood as a fundamental feature of reality rather than as a byproduct of the brain—an inquiry framed by the long-standing debate between idealism and materialism. Various anomalous and so-called paranormal phenomena are considered as indications that idealist interpretations may provide a stronger explanatory framework. Drawing on both scientific and philosophical theories, the thesis examines how quantum mechanics—particularly Carlo Rovelli’s relational interpretation—can be understood as reflecting attributes of consciousness itself. This relational perspective has already gained traction in contemporary science, and it resonates with historical and modern forms of idealism, which regard the universe and its laws as emerging from a fundamental substrate of consciousness. The thesis engages with recent proposals in idealist and quantum consciousness research, including the work of Donald Hoffman, Federico Faggin, Mauro D’Ariano, and Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. Building on these insights, it develops a new synthesis that seeks to unify aspects of quantum mechanics, idealism, and materialism into a coherent theoretical framework. This synthesis portrays spacetime as akin to a dream, with living beings as the dreamers who both generate and inhabit it. From this perspective, the logic of the world resembles dream logic, where appearances are not what they seem but conceal deeper relations, and where meaning is grounded in how reality is felt rather than how it merely appears. The thesis concludes that such a view offers a paradigm capable of restoring meaning to scientific inquiry while deepening our understanding of consciousness and reality.
This thesis addresses the mystery of consciousness and the perceived lack of meaning in science, exploring how these themes are intertwined. It investigates whether consciousness is best understood as a fundamental feature of reality rather than as a byproduct of the brain—an inquiry framed by the long-standing debate between idealism and materialism. Various anomalous and so-called paranormal phenomena are considered as indications that idealist interpretations may provide a stronger explanatory framework. Drawing on both scientific and philosophical theories, the thesis examines how quantum mechanics—particularly Carlo Rovelli’s relational interpretation—can be understood as reflecting attributes of consciousness itself. This relational perspective has already gained traction in contemporary science, and it resonates with historical and modern forms of idealism, which regard the universe and its laws as emerging from a fundamental substrate of consciousness. The thesis engages with recent proposals in idealist and quantum consciousness research, including the work of Donald Hoffman, Federico Faggin, Mauro D’Ariano, and Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. Building on these insights, it develops a new synthesis that seeks to unify aspects of quantum mechanics, idealism, and materialism into a coherent theoretical framework. This synthesis portrays spacetime as akin to a dream, with living beings as the dreamers who both generate and inhabit it. From this perspective, the logic of the world resembles dream logic, where appearances are not what they seem but conceal deeper relations, and where meaning is grounded in how reality is felt rather than how it merely appears. The thesis concludes that such a view offers a paradigm capable of restoring meaning to scientific inquiry while deepening our understanding of consciousness and reality.
Is mind quantum-like? Is consciousness quantum physical? Does consciousness have a role to play in the emergence of the classical world from the underlying quantum universe? Or is this dichotomy between classical and quantum an illusion? How can world philosophies enrich our views on these matters and interact with the best scientific theories? These are some questions that motivated us to conceive the current book. We also felt an urgent need to discuss the central philosophical questions haunting the emerging frameworks of quantum cognition and quantum-like framework (QLF). We have observed that there are very good technical or mathematical works being done in the emerging fields of quantum cognition and QLF, but there is still a great need for exploring the underlying and open philosophical questions they demand. Quantum cognition developed as a frontier research programme in understanding various cognitive phenomena that are hard or impossible to describe based on classical cognitive science paradigm. Classical cognitive science draws philosophically and mathematically from classical physics and classical probability theory. For example, cognitive realism thinking is deeply motivated by the scientific realism of classical physics. However, as we explore, there are numerous empirical findings which demonstrate clearly that human mind and cognitive processes exhibit features that are more quantum-like. Central to these features are indeterminacy, context dependence, and complementarity of cognitive phenomena, for example, perception, information retrieval, and even qualia. Many good works in the previous decade have demonstrated the efficacy of quantum-like mathematical modelling in such cases. However, given that efficacy, we cannot simply conclude that mind is quantum. Rather there are features that go beyond what is allowed in standard quantum formalism.
This paper presents Relational Quantum Dynamics (RQD), a paradigm that re-envisions quantum theory and its interplay with spacetime, observers, and consciousness. Abandoning the notion of a preexisting universe or fixed manifold, RQD posits that observers, observed systems, and geometric structures emerge together as stable relational patterns in an underlying quantum substrate. Spacetime is thus recast as an effective, large-scale feature of entanglement and information flows rather than a fundamental stage. By eliminating pre-given observers and absolute properties, RQD unifies relational quantum mechanics, insights from holography and tensor networks, and non-dual philosophical traditions into a single idealist framework. Here, universal awareness is not an added element but the ontological ground, ensuring that subjective experience and physical reality co-derive from the same relational field. This approach not only demystifies the "hard problem" of consciousness, making it intrinsic rather than emergent but also resolves longstanding quantum puzzles, such as Wigner's friend and Frauchiger-Renner scenarios, by showing that no absolute vantage point or objective collapse is required. In harmonizing quantum theory, emergent geometry, and a fundamental awareness-based ontology, RQD reveals that quantum mechanics, gravity, and consciousness are facets of a single, integrated reality.
The hard problem in consciousness is the problem of understanding how physical processes in the brain could give rise to subjective conscious experience. In this paper, I suggest that in order to understand the relationship between consciousness and the physical world, we need to probe deeply into the nature of physical reality. This leads us to quantum physics and to a second explanatory gap: that between quantum and classical reality. I will seek a philosophical framework that can address these two gaps simultaneously. Our analysis of quantum mechanics will naturally lead us to the notion of a hidden reality and to the postulate that consciousness is an integral component of this reality. The framework proposed in the paper provides the philosophical underpinnings for a theory of consciousness while satisfactorily resolving the interpretation problem in quantum mechanics without the need to alter its mathematical structure. I also discuss some implications for a scientific theory of consciousness.
Metaphysics, as discipline dealing with the most fundamental aspects of reality, studies the essence of entities, leaving to particular sciences the study of empirical, specific, changeable and unstable aspects. In this sense metaphysics is close to ontology, tackling problems as the existence of God, the being in himself, the immortality of consciousness, the origin and meaning of the universe. Speculative physics pushes its interest to metaphysical questions too, both at atechnical (mathematical) level, and at the level of thought (in relation to philosophy). In recentyears interesting concepts and ideas have been considered and developed, involving the latest unified quantum-relativistic theories and the consequences on reality deriving from them.The search for a meaning of life, one of Anscombe’s themes, finds ferment in the search for meaning about the existence of our universe in itself and as a possible part of a multiverse containing it.The problem of measurement in quantum mechanics appears from the application of themathematical formalism to macroscopic situations and the central position of the observer in this process has produced a deviation towards a metaphysical subjectivism. There are controversial aspects about the role of consciousness in the process of reducing the wave function of quantum mechanics. This narrows the field of validity of some fundamental principles during the interaction between microsystems and macrosystems, with consequent diversification of thedefinition of the ontological state of consciousness and reality. (Local) holism has often been linked to Wittgenstein. From Wittgenstein’s answers to the paradoxes of communication and conceptual relativism, a tension emerges in his vision of linguistic games and in his mental experiments, traditionally interpreted in contrasting ways. This tension can be better understoodthrough some reflections by Wittgenstein on Einstein and his theory of relativity.
This book proposes the first coherent, unified account of existence: the Two-Phase Cosmology. Phase 1 is a timeless field of infinite possibility (quantum reality), and Phase 2 is the dynamically unfolding world of embodied actuality (classical-relativistic reality). In this model, consciousness is not an accidental byproduct of matter, nor the whole of being, but the phase transition itself: the process through which a single best-possible world is selected from the physically available futures (or histories). The collapse of the quantum wavefunction is the same process. This framework resolves thirty of the deepest problems in science and philosophy, including the riddle of free will, the nature of time, the evolution of consciousness, and the role of the observer in quantum mechanics. It also offers an integrated, elegant, parsimonious resolution of almost every anomaly that troubles modern cosmology, including the fine-tuning and preferred basis problems, the Hubble and S8 tensions, the cosmological constant problem, the identity of Dark Matter, the mystery of Dark Energy, the failure to quantise gravity, and the Fermi paradox. The result is a coherent vision of a participatory cosmos in which value and meaning shape the unfolding of reality. It is not physicalism, not dualism, not idealism, and not panpsychism, but a quantum neutral monism, closest historically to the work of Kant, Whitehead, James, Bergson, Pauli and Wheeler, and more recently Roger Penrose, Thomas Nagel, Iain McGilchrist and Donald Hoffman, though its roots go all the way back to Anaximander and Pythagoras. The Sacred Structure of Reality invites us to rebuild the foundations of Western thought.
What is consciousness? Conventional approaches see it as an emergent property of complex interactions among individual neurons; however these approaches fail to address enigmatic features of consciousness. Accordingly, some philosophers have contended that "qualia," or an experiential medium from which consciousness is derived, exists as a fundamental component of reality. Whitehead, for example, described the universe as being composed of "occasions of experience." To examine this possibility scientifically, the very nature of physical reality must be re-examined. We must come to terms with the physics of spacetime--as described by Einstein's general theory of relativity, and its relation to the fundamental theory of matter--as described by quantum theory. Roger Penrose has proposed a new physics of objective reduction: "OR," which appeals to a form of quantum gravity to provide a useful description of fundamental processes at the quantum/classical borderline. Within the OR scheme, we consider that consciousness occurs if an appropriately organized system is able to develop and maintain quantum coherent superposition until a specific "objective" criterion (a threshold related to quantum gravity) is reached; the coherent system then self-reduces (objective reduction: OR). We contend that this type of objective self-collapse introduces non-computability, an essential feature of consciousness which distinguishes our minds from classical computers. Each OR is taken as an instantaneous event--the climax of a self-organizing process in fundamental spacetime--and a candidate for a conscious Whitehead "occasion of experience." How could an OR process occur in the brain, be coupled to neural activities, and account for other features of consciousness? We nominate a quantum computational OR process with the requisite characteristics to be occurring in cytoskeletal micro-tubules within the brain's neurons. In this model, quantum-superposed states develop in microtubule subunit proteins ("tubulins") within certain brain neurons, remain coherent, and recruit more superposed tubulins until a mass-time-energy threshold (related to quantum gravity) is reached. At that point, self-collapse, or objective reduction (OR), abruptly occurs. We equate the pre-reduction, coherent superposition ("quantum computing") phase with pre-conscious processes, and each instantaneous (and non-computable) OR, or self-collapse, with a discrete conscious event. Sequences of OR events give rise to a "stream" of consciousness. Microtubule-associated proteins can "tune" the quantum oscillations of the coherent superposed states; the OR is thus self-organized, or "orchestrated" ("Orch OR"). Each Orch OR event selects (non-computably) microtubule subunit states which regulate synaptic/neural functions using classical signaling. The quantum gravity threshold for self-collapse is relevant to consciousness, according to our arguments, because macroscopic superposed quantum states each have their own spacetime geometries. These geometries are also superposed, and in some way "separated," but when sufficiently separated, the superposition of spacetime geometries becomes significantly unstable and reduces to a single universe state. Quantum gravity determines the limits of the instability; we contend that the actual choice of state made by Nature is non-computable. Thus each Orch OR event is a self-selection of spacetime geometry, coupled to the brain through microtubules and other biomolecules. If conscious experience is intimately connected with the very physics underlying spacetime structure, then Orch OR in microtubules indeed provides us with a completely new and uniquely promising perspective on the difficult problems of consciousness.