Imagine standing outside in the rain.
A scientist could, in principle, describe an extraordinary amount of what is happening. The temperature of the air. The speed and chemical composition of the raindrops. The wavelengths of light reaching your eyes. The activity in your brain as you recognise what you are seeing. The changes in your nervous system as cold water touches your skin.
Yet none of those measurements tells us what it is like for you to stand there. Perhaps the rain makes you feel alive. Or it reminds you of childhood. Maybe you are miserable because you have just missed the bus. Or for a few moments the boundary between you and the world dissolves and you simply experience the rain falling.
There is the event that can be observed from outside, and there is the experience of the event from inside. That simple distinction takes us into one of the great unresolved questions of our time: consciousness.
The puzzle of experience
The philosopher David Chalmers famously called this the “hard problem” of consciousness.
Science has become extremely good at investigating what brains do. We can observe which regions become active when someone sees a face, feels pain or enters a meditative state. We can increasingly map relationships between brain activity and behaviour.
Yet there remains a strange gap. Why should all that physical activity be accompanied by experience? Why doesn’t a brain simply process information? Why should the firing of neurons be accompanied by the colour red, the smell of coffee, the pain of grief or the exhilaration of falling in love? This is what philosophers call the “phenomenal” dimension of consciousness: what an experience feels like from the inside.
Another philosopher, Thomas Nagel, approached the same mystery by asking what it is like to be a bat. We can learn enormous amounts about bats from the outside: their biology, their nervous systems, their use of echolocation. Yet however sophisticated our instruments become, we do not gain access to the bat’s experience of being a bat. There is always an inside.
I first came across this distinction years ago through Ken Wilber’s Integral four-quadrant model and wrote about it in Evolutionary Leadership (2003). We can look at a human being from the outside — brain, body and behaviour — or encounter the person’s interior world of feelings, thoughts, values and meaning. We can similarly look at a group from outside through its structures and systems, or from within through its culture and shared meanings.
All of these perspectives reflect something real. The difficulty begins when we assume that only one of them is ultimately real.
What if we started with the wrong assumption?
The dominant scientific worldview of the last few centuries has tended to start with matter. Matter exists. Matter organises itself into increasingly complex structures. Eventually brains appear. Somehow, when brains become sufficiently sophisticated, consciousness emerges.
At that point science raises a tricky question. How does something entirely objective suddenly produce something subjective? How does matter start to feel? There are many sophisticated attempts to answer that question. Yet I increasingly wonder whether part of the difficulty lies in the way we have framed the problem.
We begin by separating observer from observed, mind from matter, subject from object. Having pulled reality apart conceptually, we then spend enormous effort trying to work out how the pieces could possibly relate to one another again. What if the separation was never as fundamental as we assumed?
Two aspects of one process
Rather than saying that everything is matter, or turning the argument around and saying everything is mind, there is a third possibility. What we call mind and matter may be different aspects of a deeper reality. From outside, I encounter a brain. From inside, I experience a mind.
Perhaps these are not two separate things requiring an explanation for how they are connected. They may be two expressions of one event. This seems to be fundamental to many of the places people have got stuck when trying to work out the nature of consciousness over the last few decades. A mindset of linearity and causality is preventing them from seeing other alternatives – in fact a very simple alternative that would resolve many of their struggles.
Instead of asking: How does mind act on matter? we can ask: What deeper process gives rise to both interior experience and exterior form?
That removes one of the classic problems of dualism. If mind and matter are two separate realities, we have to explain how one can somehow impact the other. If they co-arise, there is no mysterious causal bridge to cross.
The correlation between mind and brain, for example, does not necessarily mean that one must be reduced to the other. Both may be expressions of the same underlying process. That is much closer to how I explain things in Volution.
Reality as becoming
In Volution, I describe reality as an ongoing process of becoming. Things are never simply fixed objects. A tree, a person, an organisation, a culture. Each is continuously maintaining, adapting and transforming itself.
This brings us to another important question. What holds a living system together through time? A tree is continually exchanging matter and energy with its surroundings. Cells die and are replaced. Water moves through it. Leaves fall. New branches appear. Yet somehow it retains a recognisable identity as this tree.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle used the term telos to describe the final form towards which a living process is directed. A related term, entelechy, carries the sense of a thing having its end or fulfilment active within its own becoming.
The potential oak is not simply waiting somewhere in the future for the acorn to reach it. The potential is already active in the present as part of the organising tension of the living system. The acorn expands and the oak manifests in the volutionary tension between present and potential.
The tree exists between what it currently is and what it is capable of becoming. That relationship is never static. The present conditions constrain what is possible. The potential influences what becomes probable.
That is close to a postulate that Ken Wilber uses in describing living holarchies: lower levels establish the possibilities available to higher ones, while higher-order organisation shapes the probabilities of what the lower parts actually do. This is the same concept but applied to time. Translated into volutionary language:
The actual constrains the possible.
The potential influences the probable.
Their relationship generates the trajectory of becoming.
The field between present and potential
This reflects a deeper meaning to what I have been calling the volutionary field. The tension between present and potential not only initiates a process, triggering the movement out of the unified field. That volutionary tension is also what sustains it during its life process.
As long as there is a difference between what a living system is and what it can become, there is an organising polarity. Present reality on one side, potential reality on the other. The living system exists in the dynamic relationship between them. This is the definition of literally what keeps something alive in the relative world – the creative tension between two relative poles of present and potential.
A lifecycle in the relative material world ends when that tension disappears. That might be because the entity has fulfilled its role in the ecology and manifested its fullest potential – so the two poles of present and potential have grown into each other. Or one of the poles loses its power – the present state of its material manifestation might get irreparably damaged or the need for the entity (potential) might fade – either way, the creative force field between the poles weakens and the form dissipates.
It’s important to note that the potential itself is not absolutely fixed. It changes as the environment changes. A tree growing beside a river has different possibilities from the same species growing on a dry hillside. An individual develops in relationship with family, culture, history and opportunity. An organisation’s potential shifts with its people, its purpose and its wider context.
So telos is not a predetermined destination. It is better understood as an emergent attractor towards fulfilment within a changing ecology. The potential evolves as the system evolves.
Subject and object may arise together
This brings us back to consciousness. If reality is fundamentally process rather than substance, and if living systems continuously arise through relationships between present conditions and emerging potential, then subject and object may themselves be products of this same process.
The world is not necessarily composed of separate things first and relationships second. Relationship may co-arise equally. The Buddhist idea of interbeing points in this direction. Contemplate a sheet of paper and you find the tree, the rain that fed the tree, the soil, the sunlight, the logger, the transport system and the countless conditions that made the paper possible.
The paper does not exist independently. Neither do I. My body is Earth temporarily organised into human form. My language exists because of countless generations before me. My identity emerges through relationship. My thoughts are shaped by culture, memory and interaction. Even the boundary I experience between “me” and “world” is more permeable than it first appears.
The philosopher Merleau-Ponty explored this from the perspective of lived experience. William James argued that experience itself may come before the distinction between subject and object. Whitehead went further, describing reality as a process of events becoming through relationship with both inherited actuality and unrealised possibility.
Different traditions, different language, similar intuition: the separate thing may not be the most fundamental unit of reality. The relationship may be.
Can co-arising be measured?
This is where our work with Wyrd becomes interesting. Wyrd uses random event generators — devices designed to produce unpredictable streams of data. Over time, that data should behave in statistically expected ways.
Researchers have explored for decades whether changes in human attention, intention or collective experience sometimes correlate with unusual patterns in such random systems. The effects reported in this field are small and the interpretation is far from definitive, but the possibility is intriguing.
If interior experience and exterior form are aspects of one deeper process, could changes in the interior or relational dimension of an event sometimes have measurable exterior correlates?
The wording is important. We are not asking whether “mind causes matter to change.” That would put us straight back into the dualistic problem. The hypothesis is that perhaps an unusual collective experience and an unusual statistical pattern are co-arising expressions of the same deeper event.
One is encountered through the interior dimension. The other appears through exterior measurement. Neither impacts the other in a linear causal way. That, to me, is a much more interesting possibility.
From causation to correspondence
We already accept something like this within a human being. If I am frightened, many things happen at once. My subjective experience changes. My heart rate changes. My breathing changes. My brain activity changes. My behaviour changes. Which one is the event? All of them. They are different aspects of one whole-system response.
We would be making a mistake if we assumed that the feeling of fear had to be a separate substance somehow reaching into the body and causing all the physical changes. Or vice-versa. The whole organism is responding.
What if some events work like that at larger scales? What if a group, organisation or wider human field has interior and exterior expressions too? Wyrd does not prove that – yet. It is however a very intriguing research question.
What about quantum physics?
Quantum physics inevitably enters discussions like this because it has revealed a universe far stranger than the mechanical world imagined a few centuries ago. At very small scales, probability, entanglement and measurement become central to our descriptions of reality.
It is tempting to jump from there to the conclusion that quantum physics explains consciousness. I don’t think we can say that. We do not currently know for sure that consciousness collapses quantum waves, creates matter or operates through entanglement.
The deeper contribution of modern physics may simply be that it has undermined our confidence in the old picture of reality as a collection of separate, solid objects interacting mechanically in empty space. That opens the door to new explorations.
Perhaps the hard problem is telling us something
The hard problem of consciousness may therefore be hard for a reason. It may reveal the limits of the worldview from which we are trying to solve it. If we begin with a universe made exclusively of external objects and then try to add interior experience later, consciousness looks almost miraculous.
If we begin instead with a participatory universe in which interiority and exteriority co-arise, the problem changes. We no longer have to explain how dead matter suddenly produces experience. We have to understand how one underlying process expresses itself as both experience and form.
Maybe we can go one step further. If living systems are continuously held in the tension between present reality and emerging potential, then consciousness may itself be part of that movement. Experience may be one way in which a living system participates in its own becoming.
Meaning, feeling, attention and intention may belong to the interior side of the same process that appears externally as physiology, behaviour, organisation and form.
The actual constrains what is possible. The potential influences what becomes probable. And life unfolds in the relationship between them.
Perhaps consciousness is not an inexplicable late arrival in the story of the universe. Perhaps interiority and exteriority, actuality and potentiality, form and meaning have always belonged to the same moment. The challenge then is not to force one half of reality to explain the other. It is to understand the deeper process from which both arise.
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