[Robert]

I believe the TOE has been solved but not by any one person. We all have ideas, viewpoints, perspectives that, although mostly nonsense, may contain some small pieces of truth. We are like the blind men feeling the elephant; touching a small part of the reality of the elephant and yet not realizing it is an elephant. If we could somehow integrate all these "pieces-of-truth" into a whole, we might have our TOE.

My view of a Universal Consciousness (UC) is that it would greatly complicate the Theory of Everything since it implies intelligence, non-corporeal existence, intelligent design, etc. all of which are difficult to measure, analyze objectively, and then we must be able to reduce this UC to its fundamental properties. We can't say that the fundamental fabric of the reality is the UC because then we are creating an artificial barrior through which, we cannot hope to scientifically investigate. The Theory of Everything has to explain, at a fundamental level, what the UC is.

Perhaps the word consciousness is not the best word since it has a specific meaning to people of a living entity that thinks, ponders, plans, has free will--all the same properties that humans posses. First we need to consider whether consciousness is a product of the mind or of the brain. I lean towards "its a product of the brain" based on developments in neuroscience, but I'll "assume it to be true" that consciousness is a product of mind. Is the mind then a piece of the UC? Do all minds of all beings with minds add up to the UC, is the UC a superset of all minds, or is it completely separate? Would the UC necessarily be engaging in solipsism? I've read that we live as multiple simultaneous incarnations of our soul, so that our soul may learn lessons only available to the flesh, so that it may progress spiritually and merge with the UC.

If the mind is a product of brain, perhaps consciousness then is an emergent phenomen of large numbers of brain cells interacting with each other. In this case the UC would be the emergent behavior of the interactions of the fundamental building blocks of reality. What those building blocks are I do not know except they would have to be very small and very many.

Another thought... the UC would not have senses like sight, smell, hearing, etc. but would experience reality directly. The UC would then experience the "thing-in-itself" or the noumena. We experience reality virtually in our brains based on signals from our sense organs that get processed by specific brain structures to give us a virtual reality rendering of the real world. Without our brains, if we could experience reality directly, we would experience a very different world from the illusion we're familiar with.

I think that before we can make progress, we need to research and better understand what consciousness is, at a fundamental level. This understanding should be careful not to place any area off-limits with phrases like "that's just the way it is" or "that's how God designed it" or by using abstract terms like destiny, fate, etc. Once we have this understanding, then we can determine if it can be applied to the universe as a whole.

Great thread!