James Clerk Maxwell’s work on electromagnetism is considered one of the most important scientific achievements of the 19th century. While we recognise its importance today, his contemporaries were slow to appreciate and understand it. One of the reasons was the difficulty understanding it within the prevailing scientific paradigm. It required a conceptual shift. Maxwell replaced the Newtonian model of action at a distance with a universe permeated by fields. In Maxwell’s view, mechanical forces weren’t the primary actors, they were the visible behaviour of the fields.
The idea of a field was hard to visualise because it was intangible. The scientists of the time tried to visualise fields as mechanical structures extending throughout space. Maxwell’s theory becomes elegant and intelligible when you reverse your thinking. Instead of the mechanical universe being primary and fields secondary, fields are primary and mechanics are secondary.
The view of the world that emerges from Maxwell’s theory proposes two descriptive layers as a model of reality. The first layer, the layer of the fundamental constituents, consists of fields obeying general mathematical laws. The second layer, the layer we can touch and see and interact with, consists of mechanical forces and energies. In Maxwell’s field model, the most basic processes of nature aren’t directly perceptible to our senses; they exist within a fundamental layer that lies beneath our conscious experience.
Just as Maxwell’s contemporaries had to reverse their assumptions about matter, we may need a similar reversal to solve the hard problem of consciousness. Consciousness resists physical explanation. We can explain how the brain processes information, how neurons fire. But we can’t explain why that should feel like anything at all and why it doesn’t just go on in the dark with no one experiencing it. That gap, between the physical process and felt experience, is the hard problem of consciousness.
Most modern answers to the problem assume that consciousness emerges from the activity of the brain. But that assumption does all the work. This strong sense of emergence merely offers a placeholder for an explanation, it tells us what must be true if consciousness is physical. That’s not a solution but a restatement of the problem.
The intransigence of the hard problem has caused a growing number of philosophers to explore alternatives. When we ask how consciousness emerges from the brain, we’ve already assumed it does. The problem may seem impossible because that starting assumption is wrong.
What if consciousness doesn’t emerge from matter at all and we have the order of explanation backwards? The view this book describes reverses that starting assumption and explores what it would mean if the opposite is true: consciousness is fundamental and matter is secondary. Reality, at its base, is a single field of consciousness.
Consciousness as light
We can best visualise the conscious field with the metaphor of light. The distinctive feature of consciousness is its self-luminous nature. Consciousness is like the light source, not an object revealed by another light source. Consciousness is the radiance that reveals the world to us.
But the image of light goes beyond metaphor. Physics shows us the structure of light is a dynamic field whose appearance changes as its motion is constrained. This framework uses the same structure to explain consciousness.
Maxwell’s reversal showed that the tangible layer of the world we can measure and touch is the superficial layer. It’s the visible behaviour of a more fundamental layer of reality beneath it. In this consciousness-first view, the luminous field is the deeper layer. What we see as matter is the superficial view, because it’s the appearance of the conscious field when its inner nature isn’t visible. The physics view isn’t wrong, it’s simply the external view.
We shouldn’t think of the field as a substance, but instead as energy or dynamic activity. Light is a strange phenomenon, it’s not stuff we can grasp. Its inherent nature is dynamic, always moving. Consciousness is similar, we’re always aware of something. Even in deep meditation, when your awareness of the outside world has disappeared, consciousness illuminates itself.
Using this metaphor as our model, we start with a luminous field as the foundation of reality. The field is consciousness in constant motion, it’s unified, unbounded and self-aware. So how do we get from a unified and infinite field to our own individual consciousness and the world of matter we’re all familiar with?
The unbounded luminous field has two other modes of existence: individual subjects like you and me, and the material world. They’re distinct phases of energy in the same way water and ice are both phases of H2O and not distinct substances. Steam, water and ice are all different states of the same thing, but they have different properties and behave in different ways. Steam dissipates, water flows and ice is solid, but they’re all equally real and they’re all still H2O. The different properties we observe depend on the way the underlying substance is organised and constrained.
The phase analogy tells us the three modes are one thing with different appearances, but it doesn’t tell us how the field takes one appearance rather than another. To understand that we need to look at what happens when light slows down.
When light slows, it doesn’t lose energy, its rhythm changes. As the light’s oscillating electric field passes through a region it sets electrons in motion. The moving electrons generate their own secondary waves. When the original and secondary waves overlap out of sync, their interference pattern produces a new wave that moves more slowly.
This is refraction: a change in the wave’s speed caused by the patterns of its own internal interference. Refraction is the bending and slowing of light, but it’s the same light, the same energy. Its behaviour changes and its outward appearance is different because the constraints on its movement have changed.
This consciousness-first view sees individual subjects and material objects as refracted light. The luminous field refracts into different degrees of constraint which are variations in the intensity and speed of the waves within it. We could call these density variations within the field, but it’s a density of movement, not of stuff.
This slowing of the waves generates stable and confined structures within the field. One of those structures is you.
