Scientific Foundations & Essential Insights

consciousness cosmic architecture cosmology future humans trilogy living systems scientific foundations Feb 09, 2022

The Future Humans Trilogy is based on radical new understandings that are emerging from the frontiers of a new paradigm in science and research. The new paradigm sciences offer a unitary conception of existence and the role of consciousness. These sciences include fields such as: quantum field theory, cosmology, new physics, complexity sciences, evolutionary systems design, neuroscience, epigenetics, and consciousness research.

All of the scientific references included in the trilogy relate to real-life people and research. We chose to share the scientific ideas in a storytelling way, knowing that some of these ideas are so complex and mind-boggling that many people will stop reading when exposed to such information directly. In other words, it requires a tasty meal, receptive ambience, and the warmth of human relationships to be able to digest these radical new perspectives of the nature of reality and our universe. Even then, as the saying goes, “Those who understand quantum physics, don’t understand it.”

The new paradigm sciences confirm what the ancient mystics have said from the beginning: The Universe is truly a great unity, which becomes even more apparent when we explore time as a living field in which “future, present, and past” are simultaneous and co-arising. Above all, this is the science of learning the ways in which the local self joins in the adventure of becoming resonant and reflective of the ultimate self, the great Oneness, which we call the Cosmos.

Based on our own research in the emerging fields of the new paradigm sciences, we have summarized below what we consider the essential new insights for our time, which serve as the foundations for the Future Humans Trilogy and courses. This research is referenced toward the end for further exploration.

Some of these scientific concepts and ideas may appear very complex or even difficult to understand, initially. We recommend, therefore, reading this summary as a contemplation to receive these concepts as a gift to the deep mind for opening up and activating profound new perspectives and understandings. Like with the ancient riddles, some of these concepts will only reveal themselves much later, and often when we least expect it.

Three Evolutionary Principles of Life

The Universe exists and evolves as a single unified entity, an undividable wholeness— This evolutionary principle helps us understand life as a unified reality, whereby energy-matter and space-time are complementary informational expressions of consciousness.
The Universe evolves through deepening evolutionary coherence and increasing embodied complexity, precisely tuned to make life possible—This evolutionary principle shows us how to architect and design for evolutionarily coherent complexity that is life generative.
The Universe develops its evolutionary capacities by actualizing its cosmological potentials through systemic autonomy and autopoiesis (i.e. self-creation, regulation, and adaptation)—This evolutionary principle shows us how to architect and design with the systemic conditions for growing, developing, and evolving as a self-actualizing process of consciousness.

The Nature of Reality and the Architecture of Consciousness

Consciousness exists, creates, and evolves as a unified holographic field of life—This field includes all orders of reality (locally and nonlocally), and is sentient, responsive, and communicative (Bohm, 1980; Kauffman, 2019; Laszlo et al., 2016; Penrose et al., eds., 2017). This field also acts like a womb and membrane for localizing the actualizing potentials of consciousness through the evolutionary process of life (Smitsman & Currivan, 2019).
The Cosmic architecture of the Universe is coded as a Cosmic hologram—This Cosmic architecture in-forms as well as potentiates the process of creation through an ‘alphabet’ of digits that fractal out into all levels of existence. Consciousness architects realities and worlds through this Cosmic hologram of information (Currivan, 2017).
Cosmic information is holographic and unified—Cosmic information embeds and fractally manifests the qualities and potentials of the unified field of consciousness (Smitsman & Currivan, 2021).
The Cosmic hologram generates surfaces of interdependent realities—The holographic surfaces converge the information between the implicate orders of reality and the explicate orders of life (Bohm, 1980; Smitsman, 2019).
Space-time and energy-matter are complementary states of information—Everything we call physical reality is literally made of information, which expressed as digitized bits are embedded at the Planck-scale area of the holographic boundary of space-time. This informational perspective of reality provides a radically new understanding of the nature of materiality and the primacy of consciousness (Currivan, 2017; Smitsman & Currivan, 2021).
Space-time emerges from more fundamental structures that precede it—Space-time as a data-structure projects a three-dimensional surface within which the flow of time manifests as its fourth dimension (Currivan, 2017). This raises the question as to whether space-time itself is part of more fundamental structures that precede it, and for which new principles of physics are required to understand this (Arkani-Hamed, 2015, 2017). It also raises the question of whether the expansion of space results from the ways in which the Universe embodies complexity, and whether this could be considered as evidence for how our universe learns and evolves (Smitsman & Currivan, 2019; Smitsman & Smitsman, 2020).
States of information correspond to states of consciousness—At the quantum, nonlocal levels of reality, information exists in a superposition state of simultaneous possibilities. When digitized, this means that information can be in a state of 0 and 1, and all variances of such. At the local (physical) level, information appears in a binary state of either-or. When digitized, this means that information appears in a state of 0 or 1, which is the informational state that most of our current digital programs run by. By exploring the various states in which information can exist and manifest, we gain a powerful new perspective for better understanding the nature of consciousness and how to redesign our human systems and growth models with the Cosmic architecture of life (Smitsman & Currivan, 2021).
The geometry of space-time is part of the architecture of our body-mind complex—Cylindrical protein polymers within the neurons of our brains, called “microtubules,” provide our brains with the same quantum computation capacities as the Universe. These microtubules are able to self-assemble and interconnect to make it possible for the membrane structures and genes in the cell nucleus to communicate and exchange. These microtubules also appear to play a key role in the experience of self-consciousness, within which, quantum and binary states of information converge and integrate (Hameroff, 1998; Hameroff & Chopra, 2012).
Quantum gravity thresholds play a key role in the architecture of choice—Quantum gravity thresholds form part of fundamental ripples in space-time geometry and appear to play a fundamental role in how systems choose (shift) between quantum superposition states and singular states (Hameroff & Penrose, 2014). The architecture of choice-making is non-algorithmic and confirms the hypothesis that consciousness is not computational and thus not deterministic (Fridman, 2020). We postulate how quantum gravity can be considered as the feminine principle of contraction, which is essential for manifestation and enables embodied self-conscious experiences.

The Imaginal Realm and the Presence of the Future

The imaginal realm forms part of the Cosmic architecture of life—The imaginal realm is cosmologically present in all levels and realities of existence as the space to dream into the higher dream and become our future possibilities.
Futures exist now within the imaginal realm of consciousness through which life transforms and renews—The imaginal realm is an inner state of consciousness that is essential for learning, healing, evolving, and transforming (Smitsman et al., 2018).
We can imaginally activate and attract our futures into being—The imaginal state is the superposition quantum state of simultaneous possibilities, which is essentially a future state of consciousness. We can consciously evolve by imaginally activating and attracting the future potentials of higher orders of reality into the embodied state of our local context (Kauffman, 2019; Smitsman et al., 2018).
Future potentials are nonlocal information that converge into local information through the holographic membrane structures of space-time—The membrane structures of space-time can be likened to a holographic fishing net, as well as a Cosmic womb for impregnating the surface levels of reality with the imaginal potencies of future potentials. This feminine perspective of materiality is fundamental for creating generative and fertile systems and cultures.
When future states become locally engaged, they can shift the entire system into higher orders of realities—Our imaginal powers provide direct access to the imaginal and future states of consciousness. By activating future states of higher orders of reality we can override and transform the conditioning of past structures and beliefs. The engagement of future states plays a key role in immunity related learning, as well as for epigenetic, biomic, and planetary health.

Evolutionary Coherence and the Cosmic Architecture of Life

The Cosmic architecture of life is evolutionarily coherent, precisely tuned to actualize the potentials of consciousness—By architecting our world with the Cosmic architecture of life, we can co-create evolutionarily coherent systems and cultures that enable global consciousness to become self-conscious in the human experience.
Evolutionary coherence is essential for our personal, collective, and planetary health and development—When evolutionary coherence is strong, synergy, collaboration, and mutual understanding naturally emerge. Evolutionary coherence creates the flow states and resonance conditions for attunement with the unified fields of consciousness, which are vital for our evolutionary development and planetary wellbeing.
Creating evolutionarily coherent growth patterns is the fundamental breakthrough understanding for resolving our sustainability crisis—Evolutionarily coherent growth emerges from systems that are rooted in the Cosmic architecture of life. Evolutionarily coherent growth is in tune with the systemic boundaries that serve the integrity of the whole. Systems that are not rooted in, and regulated by, the unified fields of the Cosmic architecture become systemic thrivability barriers. Systemic barriers manifest as harmful exponential, extractive, and cancerous growth patterns, as well as polarized diversity that attempts to divide and fracture the wholeness of life (Smitsman, 2019).
When evolutionary coherence drops below a critical threshold, the conditions for systemic collapse become manifest—We harm and diminish evolutionary coherence by: ignoring the Cosmic architecture of life in the way we design, grow, and develop our systems;
- creating and imposing goals that only serve the agendas of a few;
- dividing, fragmenting, and polarizing the diversity of our world through harmful competitive win-lose dynamics;
- operating through the principle of dominance, preventing and disabling our diversity from converging, integrating, and evolving;
- employing extractive growth methods that are not rooted in the Cosmic implicate order growth dynamics, causing harm and imbalance to our planetary systems;
- creating degenerative growth patterns through dualistically polarized governance systems.
The Cosmic architecture holds the key for co-creating the new civilizations that are thrivable by design—The Cosmic architecture reveals how life is a unified reality and how matter is a form of consciousness that transforms through the cycles of life. We have created an unsustainable human world, because we have not sufficiently applied the cosmological architecture of life in the design, architecture, growth models, and activities of our human societies. By embodying and embedding the cosmological potentials of consciousness we become the future humans of a thrivable and conscious world.

Scientific References

Arkani-Hamed, N. (2017, December 1). The Doom of Spacetime - Why It Must Dissolve Into More Fundamental Structures [Video]. PSW Science. https://bit.ly/2SbsI5Y

Arkani-Hamed, N. (2015). Nima Arkani-Hamed on the Amplituhedron (Annual Report 2013–2014). Institute for Advanced Study. https://bit.ly/3u5GfJp

Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the implicate order. Routledge.

Currivan, J. (2017). The Cosmic Hologram: In-formation at the Center of Creation. Inner Traditions/Bear & Company.

Fridman, L. (2020, March 31). Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe | Lex Fridman Podcast #85 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orMtwOz6Db0

Hameroff, S., & Chopra, D. (2012, January 24). The “Quantum Soul” Part3 – Orchestrated Objective Reduction (“Orch OR”). https://bit.ly/3fqFCEC

Hameroff, S. (1998). Quantum computation in brain microtubules? The Penrose–Hameroff ‘Orch OR’ model of consciousness. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A., 356(1743) 1869–1896. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.1998.0254

Hameroff, S. & Penrose, R. (2014). Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory. Physics of Life Reviews. 11(1), 39–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2013.08.002

Kauffman, S. A. (2019). A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life (1st ed.). Oxford University Press.

Laszlo, E. et al. (2016). What Is Reality? The New Map of Cosmos, Consciousness, and Existence. SelectBooks.

Penrose, R., et al. (Eds.). (2017). Consciousness and the Universe: Quantum Physics, Evolution, Brain & Mind. Cosmology Science Publishers.

Smitsman A. (2019). Into the Heart of Systems Change. [Doctoral dissertation, International Centre for Integrated assessment and Sustainable development (ICIS), Maastricht University]. https://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.28450.25280

Smitsman, A., & Currivan, J. (2021). Healing our Relationship with Gaia through a New Thrivability Paradigm. In J. Wright (Ed.), Subtle Agroecologies: Farming With the Hidden Half of Nature. CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9780429440939

Smitsman, A., & Currivan, J. (2019). Systemic Transformation into the birth canal. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 36(4), 604–613. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2573

Smitsman, A., Laszlo, A., & Barnes, K. (2018). Attracting our Future into Being–The Syntony Quest. World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research, 75(4), 194–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/02604027.2018.1499850

Smitsman A., & Smitsman A.W. (2020). The Future-Creative Human: Exploring Evolutionary Learning. World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research, 77(2), 81–115. https://bit.ly/3bGFkbY