So, having established that I am satisfied by neither the mainstream scientific nor religious explanations, the big questions remain: "How and why am I here?". Before I launch into my response to those simple but profound questions I would like to mention a couple of points by way of a small disclaimer. Firstly, very little, if any of what I have to say here is original: you will, with very little effort, locate many similar idealistic themes expressed in hundreds of books, articles and websites. I have linked to several books and sites from this website. Secondly, there is a widely recognised difficulty in trying to imagine these concepts: as humans living in a physical/temporal reality, we are not well equipped to imagine events happening outside of the framework of linear time. Event A caused event B and B led to event C. I believe that events A, B, and C all happen in the "eternal now" but I can't attempt to suggest how to imagine that "now". Nevertheless, it makes sense to me that our perception of time is a convenient construct which allows us to operate on this material plane but that it is essentially an illusion (as, indeed, the earlier Einstein quote insisted).

Incidentally, we must be very careful about the term "illusion". Physical reality is very real (I wouldn't recommend taking a flying leap off a cliff to prove the illusion). Within our present framework, the familiar laws apply and only under exceptional circumstances can they be sidestepped to any significant degree. I think that the illusory nature of any particular reality framework is something generally only fully appreciated from a higher perspective. By "higher", I imagine some remote dimensional vantage point from which one could view other dimensions "side-by-side" whereas, in the "lower" dimensions (such as ours) we cannot easily view those adjacent to, above or below our own. Again, as with linear time, we are conditioned to think in terms of three spatial dimensions and trying to imagine more may well be beyond us. Just try to imagine a three dimensional curve (people usually suggest something like a banana but, of course, only the surface is curved and is therefore a two dimensional curve).

I mentioned exceptional circumstances in the last paragraph and I would suggest here and now that these are precisely what humans have been aware of - and attempting to perfect - since the dawn of human history. From Shamanic rituals and drug-taking, through pagan rites and induced religious ecstasy to the practice of Alchemy and on to the 20th century experimentation with "altered states of consciousness". All have been directed at apprehending this "other-worldly" experience. I would further suggest that the denizens of these adjacent dimensions are occasional (if not regular) visitors to our own reality. To us, they might appear as aliens, or UFO's, or ghosts - even fairies, goblins or devils. Our perceptions are likely to be shaped by our beliefs which might explain why reported UFO's in the 1940's looked like contemporary comic book representations of flying saucers, while later reports might describe something akin to those depicted in movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

And so - at last - to the nitty gritty. How and Why? As I have attempted to point out throughout these pages, Science tends to pride itself on solving the How and most scientists would think that they have a pretty good handle on that particular aspect already. Science doesn't really do the Why. The Why is for the philosophers or the religious. Scientists mostly consider the Why to be irrelevant anyhow - after all, there is no reason to it all: it is all a cosmic fluke. On the other hand, Religion does do the Why. It is all part of God's great plan and they (the religious) have a pretty good handle on what the Lord is trying to do here. But Religion does not do the How. God moves in mysterious ways and his methods will be revealed on Judgment Day. Please excuse my flippancy here but this is exactly what I meant when I said that both views are incredibly naive. Thankfully, for those not welded to either faith system, there is an alternative view. It is the one I subscribe to although I don't pretend to have all the answers and I don't know that I am right. I have no personal verification to support my convictions. I have not had an out-of-body or a Near-Death experience. I have tried meditation and self-hypnosis but I'm not very good at either. Regrettably, I'm only working on a basis of what makes intellectual sense to me ... and I'm not the sharpest mind on the planet. Thankfully, many wiser men and women have walked the path before me.

Imagine, if you will, a mind. A single mind. This mind is aware of only one thing: itself. It has no point of reference. Nothing to compare itself with. As far as this mind is aware, nothing else exists but itself. Be careful: whenever I go too far into trying to imagine what I'm describing here, I end up in tears at the truly awful loneliness of this mind. The mind needs to know itself but it has nothing to work with. Except! Except the one and only thing it needs: infinite potential. It has the power to create. Like your mind or my mind (which are mini-versions of the same mind) it can imagine. Imagination is creativity. There is literally no limit to what it can create. It can even create other minds - albeit within itself because there is no without. No outside exits.

So other minds are created. In order to be effective they must have the illusion of independence although all is happening within the single mind and all subsequent experience is inevitably experienced by the source. Each sub-mind must have free will. Most importantly, they must have the ability to create. And they can create other minds too. And these other minds must have the same abilities to create and the same free will to create whatever they can imagine. With this freedom comes diversity and evolution. The power to create is first devolved into independent sub-minds which then have the freedom to evolve in any way their imagination and will might take them.

What kind of directions might this creativity take our new minds? Again, the possibilities are endless: the potential is infinite. Let's follow one thread then: the one that leads to you and me. Having been endowed with the awareness of each other, perhaps groups - or hierarchies - of minds got together to work on creative projects and maybe one of those projects became our universe? Perhaps our group of minds - our gods, if you like - discovered that a wholly different kind of experience could be had by restricting the parameters of existence. In the natural environment of the infinite consciousness, mind has no limits. A mind can be here, there and everywhere. It has no regard for the sequence of cause and effect: like the author of a novel, it can go back and change events to bring about a different outcome. But wouldn't it be interesting to experience a far more restricted existence; to apply the constraints of three dimensional space and linear time. To work within a reality governed by immutable laws. And, most importantly, to limit awareness to a finite lifetime. These conditions, of course, would require a precisely ordered "virtual" reality. In other words: a self contained universe.

One might speculate that a super-intelligent race of aliens (perhaps machines) could have created our virtual reality. But that only moves the source one step further back and still leaves the original creators of the virtual universe inhabiting a material universe. What I am suggesting is something quite different. In a nutshell, I am saying that creation is a self-perpetuating process. That reality - any kind of reality - has a built-in purpose to create and to learn from that creation. That evolution can only work if the thing that is evolving is - at some level - conscious of its purpose to advance and refine. The process (and, by definition, the creator of the process) cannot be perfect otherwise there would be no need for the process in the first place. Therefore we should expect to see "mistakes" and dead-ends. Throughout, free-will is essential to the process: how could it learn anything new if the outcome is pre-determined?

For me, it is often difficult to theorise about the formation of the universe or the process of evolution while maintaining the root assumption that the material of that universe is composed of nothing more than mind stuff: thoughts. But then, in our modern computer age, we have a very convenient analogy: the computer game. So far, we have managed to create "3D" worlds for our imaginary protagonists. These worlds are becoming ever more complex; ever more detailed. The logic has certain laws built-in, such as collision detection: i.e. what happens when the outer boundary of one virtual object collides with the boundary of another. If you have ever played around with amateur 3D graphics engines, they often do not have collision detection and you will be frustrated to find your virtual self walking through a virtual rock or table. Yet it is not a far stretch of our own imagination to conceive of a virtual 3D world that mimics out own down to the last sub-atomic particle, though not one virtual particle would be "real" as we understand (or think we understand) the term. But here's what is more difficult to imagine: could we ever endow our virtual inhabitants with free will, self-awareness and the capacity for original thought? Personally, I doubt it but I don't rule it out. Our media has fed us with a load of hyperbole about the progress of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) but you might be surprised to find out just how little actual progress has been made since Alan Turing made that famous statement at the very dawn of the computer age:

"I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."

Well, for all his genius, he was wrong. He devised a test out of which a competition and prize has arisen: The Loebner Prize. There are three medals to the prize: Gold, Silver and Bronze. All that is required to win the Gold Prize is for a machine to fool a human judge into thinking he or she is talking to another human for a period of five minutes. Nobody has ever come close to winning either the Gold or the even less demanding Silver prize.

"Loebner contests are often farcical and Hugh Loebner does act foolishly. But the closer one looks at the history of the Loebner Prize, the more it appears that Loebner's real offense was showing up the biggest stars in "real" artificial intelligence as a bunch of phonies. Thirty years ago, Minsky and other A.I. researchers were declaring that the problem of artificial intelligence would be solved in less than a decade. But they were wrong, and every year the failure of computer programs to get anywhere close to winning the Loebner Prize underlines just how spectacularly off the mark they were." John Sundman in an article for Salon.com

The reason I don't dismiss the idea of machine intelligence is that we have creative minds and it is the job of creative minds to create - even to the extent of creating other minds. The reason I think it unlikely is that I don't believe that independent thought and free will can be programmed externally. Mind stuff may be ubiquitous but it is shaped and fashioned by an evolving and increasingly self-aware intelligence. Human minds are the most advanced we know of in our reality and I think that there are at least two components to the human mind. One component would be part of, and confined to, this earthly dimension and the other part would be transdimensional, meaning that it would have access to the greater reality outside of what we would term "the physical". For convenience, we might think of the earthly component as the ego and the neurological control mechanisms of the brain. The transdimensional aspect would be what we commonly refer to as the soul, spirit or "true self". It is the "I" in "I am". Although I have no objection to the concept of a machine having a soul, at what point would a soul deem its potential host advanced enough? All sorts of questions arise at this point: what about animal souls, for example? I have to say that I have not ventured far enough down most of those side-roads to have any solid opinions. So, to return to the questions of where and how did we get here: as you can see, I see the role for evolution but not by the mechanism of natural selection by random mutation. Being an idealist, I think that consciousness guides the process of evolution throughout. Not as some singular divine designer but as part of a conscious progression of experimentation and discovery. An individual mind is aware of itself as a conscious entity but it is also aware of itself as part of a larger conscious entity. A species entity might be one such grouping, with the ability to manipulate the selection and triggering of genes in the DNA in order to effect change and progress. Just as individuals die out in order to make way for new and slightly different individuals, so then do species die out. As I said, experiments can go wrong and dead-ends may be commonplace because the process itself is not determined at the outset. That's the whole point of the process: to explore, learn and feed back.

This page is entitled "The Big Questions". In my view, the question of consciousness is the biggest of all. From a scientific point of view, even among the materialist majority there is a spectrum of theories. Materialism, by definition, precludes an idealist explanation and that, to me, is the big pity. Neuro-scientists are scanning various bits of the brain and every once in a while there will be a claim such as "we believe we have found the location of the memory" as if there were a bundle of cells that act in a similar way to computer memory chips. Others like to dismiss consciousness as a mere "epiphenomenon": a by-product of electro-chemical brain activity where the primary function of the brain is to provide and refine responses to survival challenges (in line with classical Darwinian theory). I have already devoted a couple of earlier pages to the scientific theories of consciousness so I don't want to repeat myself too much here. Suffice to say that it is my view that an open minded approach to a consciousness-based reality might eventually provide explanations for all manner of phenomena including the so-called paranormal, the question of after-death survival and even the tricky conundrums of Quantum Mechanics.

The following quote is from a transcript of a psychology podcast called Shrink Rap Radio. The participants are the host, David Van Nuys, Ph.D., and Dean Radin, Ph.D., who is a well known author on the subject of consciousness as well as being Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS).

Dr. Radin: … I mean, one way of thinking of it is that if consciousness is more fundamental than matter or energy… if matter and energy, or I guess you could start with just energy… if energy, as we understand it, arises or is an emergent property of consciousness, then consciousness would be at the bottom of the way that we hierarchically understand how things are stuck together, in which case, what I see in the double slit experiment should be expected. Consciousness is more fundamental than the photon, in which case, of course, consciousness would be able to push it around. And maybe that is the case. It’s also convenient because it doesn’t suggest the dualistic world. It’s not as though consciousness and matter are truly separate things, but rather it becomes a mental monism, where consciousness really is at the way the fabric of reality is constructed, and the ripples in that fabric are what we see and think about as matter and energy, but the substance of the fabric itself is consciousness. So…

Dr. Dave: Well, this is…yeah, go ahead.

Dr. Radin: I don’t know if… I have no idea whether what I just said is true or not, but it’s a working model, and it’s a convenient way of resolving all of the anomalies associated with consciousness, including psychic phenomena, mysticism, and all the rest of it, suddenly become understandable, and it does no violence at all to the rest of science, because the rest of science can start with matter and energy, and all the rest of it spins out perfectly well. The only place where you start bumping into a problem is in the neurosciences, which is kind of a neo-behaviorism approach, where the brain literally is the mind. Well, starting from an assumption that consciousness is fundamental, you would simply say, “Well, no. You made a category mistake, and you’re assuming that the neuro-correlates are the same as mind, but actually that’s not true.”

Like Dr. Radin, I cannot claim any fundamental truth for my ideas. I can claim that there is evidence to support them and there are thousands of books and websites describing that evidence (not least the research, books and website of Dr. Radin himself). However, this section of this website is about my worldview - for anyone who happens to be interested. My only objective for throwing these ideas into the public arena is the hope that they will, in some small way, add to the challenge to the materialist dogma presently dominating the academic and scientific establishments. The materialists might turn out to be right but they still deserve to be challenged, as does any dominant dogma.