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Joe Corbett has been living in Shanghai and Beijing since 2001. He has taught at American and Chinese universities using the AQAL model as an analytical tool in Western Literature, Sociology and Anthropology, Environmental Science, and Communications. He has a BA in Philosophy and Religion as well as an MA in Interdisciplinary Social Science, and did his PhD work on modern and postmodern discourses of self-development, all at public universities in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. He can be reached at [email protected].

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The Hungry Universe

Joe Corbett

One of the most popular metaphors in usage today is that of the “conscious universe”, or the idea that the ground of the universe is consciousness, thus seemingly to affirm the Eastern spiritual view of the cosmos where all is Mind and we are just the thoughts and dreams in Brahma's brain, or some such thing. While having some metaphysical appeal to it, this idea falls into the category of anthropocentric thinking, failing to advance our spiritual ideas about the universe much further than the notion that God is an old man in the sky with a grey beard. Moreover it hopelessly indulges our narcissism that the universe comes in the image of—who would of thought—the philosophers favorite organ, the brain, or more precisely His brain. “Ain't I grand, ain't I so cool. Ah, wonderful Me!”.

To be fair, in the more sophisticated versions of this metaphor, as opposed to the naïve and false notions that our consciousness collapses the wave function and thereby the universe is created by consciousness as its ground, some propose that the universe computes itself into existence like a giant computer in which the calculations of the interactions of matter and energy at each moment performed by the laws of the universe itself could be likened to a universal brain or mind. I myself have proposed such a model using the wave function mapped onto the AQAL as the mechanism by which the universe does these calculations from moment to moment, as it oscillates between the past memory field in space-time it has accumulated (the Akashic records, dark matter, or the probability fields of the LLQ) and the vast superposition of future potentialities in the quantum fields of the present (the adjacent possibles and multiple alternative pathways of the ULQ).

The problem with this idea of the conscious universe is that it still remains a metaphor that we humans can relate to as an object of our own experience and reality as creatures with brains and minds that calculate in the course of judging and thinking about the world. The truth of the matter is that we have no idea what the universe is, even if it is in fact calculating itself into existence. It is a giant leap of imagination to say that the ground of the universe is consciousness because it appears to be doing something we ourselves do with our brains. The truth of the matter is that what the universe is and what it's doing here is a Mystery, and let's have the humility to face that rather than to project our own image onto it and then think we know what it's all about.

We and organisms in general may in fact even be self-similar subsystems of what the universe is doing as it comes into existence from moment to moment, as the fractal universe hypothesis proposes. But just because electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom does not mean that the solar system is therefore a giant atom. Each system has its own unique characteristics and is doing very different things from the other. Sorry, “Atman is Brahman”, that's just a metaphor, and so no, you are not God, nor even in the image of God any more than an atom is in the image of the solar system. The resemblance is only superficial, and so to use that metaphor to describe or experience yourself would only be superficial too, and pathetically narcissistic I might add, kinda like believing Santa is going to personally deliver presents to you if you're a good little boy or girl.

Nevertheless, we humans like to use metaphors to understand ourselves and to relate to our world, even if those metaphors might not be “true” in an objective sense. So if we want to insist on affirming our humanity and continue to experience the wonder of the universe through our personal metaphoric experience of it, which is what spirituality does, first we should recognize the limitations and illusory nature of the metaphors we are using. Ergo, consciousness is NOT the ground of the universe in any objective sense. Second, we should use more accurate metaphors. And to that end I want to propose that the ground of the universe isn't so much consciousness and the awareness a brain gives us, but rather it is hunger and the fulfilment of desire a stomach gives us.

Admittedly, this is a hard pill to swallow for philosophers who want to experience the universe in their own image as a thinking being and would prefer not to identify with the likes of microbes and mere animals. That's a bit of a blow to our narcissism. But the reasoning for this switch of metaphors is quite sound as far as the use of metaphors is concerned, as it is a more accurate representation of the objective truth for the ground of the universe, and what is the project of enlightenment itself if not seeking to get closer to the objective truth of things even as we continue to integrate this with our own subjective and intersubjective truths.

Using a metaphoric understanding, before the universe was conscious and aware, it was hungry and feeding. Biologically, think of this as metabolism coming before thought, or the krebs cycle coming before and indeed as the precondition of life. This should be simple enough given the common understanding of the hierarchy of needs where higher operations come after, not before, the lower operations, and where greater complexity comes after less complex functions. A thinking mind requires a well-fed belly, fair enough?

Sure enough, we see this metaphor of a hungry stomach operating in the universe as no less and arguably even more central to its existence than a conscious universe computing the interactions of matter and energy. As being foundational to the universe, the metaphor of a hungry universe should replace or at the very least supplement the metaphor of a conscious universe. At the foundation of the matter and light-energy of the universe there is the dark vacuum energy, which not only makes up 70 percent of the universe, the nearly infinite energy potential of the quantum vacuum was there before the material universe came into existence, with the distribution of matter-energy in the universe being a shadow projection or frozen trace of the vacuum fluctuations out of which the physical universe emerged.

Metaphorically speaking, this emptiness was the primordial hunger that desired to be filled with matter-energy, as nature and the cosmos abhors a vacuum and wants to be filled when empty. This can also be recognized in the principle of least action and energy, where nature tends to quickly and automatically fill the lower rungs of energy, as in entropy, before building them up again by adding energy to the system, as in evolution.

So what we have in the beginning, at the foundational core of the universe, is this desire-hunger to fill the emptiness, to go forth on the hunt in search of the other to absorb into oneself, to eat the other and to build atoms from particles, molecules from atoms, and more complex systems from molecules by this process of matter-energy feeding on itself, building larger and more complex structures as it goes. This is the action of Spirit in the creation of holons, or Eros by any other name, if you will, a gathering together of ever larger wholes by integrating the previous instantiations, or cosmic evolution by any other name.

Of course, this matter-energy feeding on itself to create ever larger and more complex systems thru the computations of all the various matter-energy interactions in the physical universe is all mediated and made possible by the vacuum energy itself as described by quantum electro-dynamics (QED) and quantum chromo-dynamics (QCD), which describe the mediations of the immaterial virtual particles of dark energy on physical matter. Thus the primordial empty and hungry stomach that began it all in the first place, the Desire of the universe, the grumblings of the vacuum fluctuations, the Hunger that desired to be filled and continues to mediate the feeding frenzy and orgy of physical interactions, is the foundation of the Kosmos, and the computations that matter-energy makes to feed on itself by way of the wave function, the “conscious” aspect of the universe, is a secondary epiphenomenon.

Is the universe conscious? Perhaps it is, metaphorically speaking. But then before it was conscious, it was hungry, and before it thought about what it was, it desired to exist.