Conscious of matter - a conversation

“Different states of vibration take us to altering levels of consciousness and therefore to differing perceptions of reality. Therefore everything around us had a degree of consciousness.”
“What, even bugs? What about rocks and plants?”
“Everything. The insects have an altered sense or reality, you know this already. They see the world through a pixilated ultra-violet spectrum. The colours that we see flowers possess look utterly different to bees and butterflies. It’s been proven that plants communicate with one another, that trees require a symbiotic relationship with fungus in the soil, that plants under infestation with insects will issue an alarm to other plants an attempt to make themselves unpalatable to pests. As for rocks, how is it that I can crumble graphite in my fingers and yet, chemically, it’s the same material as diamond?”
“But insects don’t exist in a parallel reality, they live in ours.”
“True, which is why stick insects have evolved their camouflage, why moths appear as leaves or bark and yet they still view the world in an alien way to us. To survive in a world haunted by animals and birds with a visible spectrum such as ours they have evolved these techniques. Don’t forget as lifeforms, they have been in this world far longer than us. ”
“Visible spectrum?”
“Yes. We know that light, like sound, travels in waves. The frequency of these waves dictates what is visible, hence you get the long slow waves of radiowaves through to the rapidly repeating gamma rays. Our visible spectrum of red through to violet is a narrow band in this wavelength between infrared and ultraviolet, yet all these colours are contained within white light.”
“Radiowaves? So sound and light are the same thing?”
“No, although they both travel as waves, they are different. Light can travel in a vacuum but sound cannot. Sound is merely an excitement of atoms, it needs a medium through which to travel. Light, on the other hand, is composed of photons - the elementary particle of electromagnetic radiation – therefore, unlike sound, light has the duality of being a particle and a wave.”
“So what’s beyond radio waves and gamma waves?”
“Well that’s the question, isn’t it? It could be that there are lower frequencies that our instruments can’t quantify and maybe higher frequencies than gamma waves… although the energy required to produce such an electromagnetic burst would be literally astronomical. However we live in a hypothetical multiverse, so why not?”
“A multiverse?”
“Yes, whereby many different realities occupy the same spacetime. I see that you’re confused, but look; the big bang was a quantum event, yes? Well we can still discern gravitational waves from this event in particular the inflation effect soon after. There are unseen force as that affect the universe in which we reside. The universe is expanding, yet what moves in to occupy the space between galaxies? We see nothing and yet this nothing must be something in order to push them apart.”
“This is all pseudoscience, mere philosophy.”
“On a quantum level observation yields only chaos; sub particles, for instance, have to rotate multiple times until the same face reveals itself to us. How is such a thing possible? We see the universe in terms of an orrery; where all is as clockwork and predictable. But we live in a goldilocks universe, where everything is just right. Not only do we live on a planet that lies in the habitable zone around our sun whereby liquid water can exist. Or that we have a moon that keeps our planet tectonically active, that coincidentally has the same size/distance ratio from said sun enabling the glory that is a solar eclipse. Neither that our solar system has gas giants sucking up the majority of comets and space debris that would otherwise bombard us… But we just so happen to exist in a universe whereby matter itself can exist. Therefore surely it stands to reason that other universes must be out there. Some theorise that there must be at least nine types of parallel universes, but it could be an inconceivable number. The deeper we delve the more philosophical it all becomes, it is at the very edge of our scientific understanding.”
“I think I can get my head around that, but what were you saying about vibrations?”
“In this universe everything is energy. Light is energy, we know sound is energy. I twist a rubber band and my movement creates energy, which is stored in the rubber band’s elasticity.”
“You mentioned rocks before, they don’t have energy.”
“Yes they do, on an atomic level they are in motion. It’s merely that with our limited perception we don’t see it. Most of what we call rock is in actual fact empty space. Its solid form is the result of the energy from its chemical bonds. But if I apply energy using a hammer I can break off pieces; that’s me applying greater energy than the chemical bonds.”
“Hang on that implies that this material world isn’t really matter at all?”
“Exactly. It’s really energy.”
“But what of consciousness?”
“Have you ever heard of the double slit experiment?”
“Is that whereby you can discern if something is a particle or a wave?”
“Yes that’s the one. If I set up a screen and fire marbles through a single slit, the marbles will hit the screen and make a shape corresponding to the slit. If I put two slits in from of the screen I’ll get two corresponding bands forming on the screen. However if I fire light at the slits, particles which we know travels in waveform, where both waves meet after exiting the slits you get interference patterns. So the screen will show multiple slit shapes, separated by area where no light strikes the screen at all.”
“Yes, I think I’ve seen such images, fascinating stuff. But that doesn’t prove consciousness.”
“No… but if we go to the quantum level and fire electrons at the single slit we get one band shape but two slits form the same multiple interference patterns. The electrons – actual matter, was behaving as a wave.”
“Maybe they were merely bouncing off each other and making the interference pattern that way?”
“Well the next logical step to check this is to fire individual electrons at the slits.”
“Yes and thereby making two slit patterns on the screen.”
“You’d think… and yet after an hour or so off firing individual electrons at the slits the same banded interference pattern is observed on the screen. Which means the single electron is fired at the slits and becomes a wave of potentials, splitting and going through both slits and therefore interfering with itself and hitting the screen making that banded pattern. Mathematically this is mind- blowing; the single electron goes through both slits or none, through one or the other simultaneously.”
“Did they check this, observe which slit the electron passes through?”
“This is where it gets strange. Equipment was set up to observe the slits to see which one the electrons, fired singularly, went through. It was observed that the electron only went through one at a time, not both. The screen revealed that only two slit patterns were made.”
“Hang on, so the electron was behaving like a particle, not a wave? How did it make the interference pattern before?”

“It was the very act of measuring that did this. If left alone there is a wave of potentials from the electron, but under observation this wave of potentials collapses… as if the electron was aware that it was being observed.”
“But that begs the question of the nature of matter, is it made of particles or waves… and if the electron knows that its being observed that implies a degree off…”
“Consciousness! Exactly!”

Also published as http://sunshard.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/are-we-conscious-of-matter-conversation.html