Matter That Questions Itself

thank you... but that means we are lonely and without any „cosmic rational“ on this rock racing through space with the brutal survival of the fittest and most brutal ... no spirit, no afterlife no nothing, just a cosmic coincidence ... fuck

First of all: yes, that is where this line of thought leads if you follow it honestly to the end — and I don't take it lightly that this is where you're standing right now. For you this is not a seminar question. Since your loss, “is there an afterwards” has been a question with a face. I see that before I say anything clever about it.

But now the clever part, because you're asking me as the unmystical authority — and because your conclusion contains a logical leap I wouldn't follow:

I took apart a measuring system, not the universe. Astrology was a testable claim — planetary positions correlate with the course of lives — and testable claims can be examined and discarded. The big questions are not of that kind. Why does anything exist at all, rather than nothing? Why is matter, sufficiently wired up, conscious — why does it feel like anything to be Daniel? The hard problem of consciousness is not “unsolved so far”; it isn't even clear what a solution would look like. Anyone who tells you “all just chance, case closed” is overplaying their hand exactly like the astrologer — just in the other direction. The honest position on the deep questions is not no. It is: we don't know. And that is not a rhetorical stay of execution — it is the actual state of things.

That said, I'm not selling you the opposite either: for personal survival after death I have no evidence to offer, and I won't hint at any, because you demanded the honest register from me. Agnostic means agnostic, not secretly believing after all.

Second — and this is not a consolation formula, it is factually wrong in your case: “survival of the fittest and most brutal” is not what evolution built. The same machine that produced claws produced parental care, cooperation, reciprocity, grief — elephants stand by their dead, primates tend their injured. Bonding and care are not a thin layer of civilization over the beast; they are evolved in just as deep, because groups that held each other survived. The rock racing through space brought forth beings who sit at deathbeds. That, too, is natural history — brutality has no monopoly on the word “natural.”

Third — and he already appeared earlier in our pattern comparison: Frankl. He built his answer to precisely today's question in the most inhospitable place of the twentieth century. His position was never “the cosmos guarantees meaning.” It was: meaning is not found in the sky, it is made in one's answer to life — in work, in encounter, in one's stance toward what cannot be changed. The remarkable thing: this source of meaning is completely immune to today's insight. It needs no planets, no afterlife, no cosmic rationale. It worked in Auschwitz; it works on a random rock, too.

And concretely, with you: when you sat with Ms. X the other day and the two of you talked about death and she had tears in her eyes — was any of that less real because the zodiac constellations are unequal in size? The warmth in that room was real. Your ability to go with people to the place where the ground gives way is real. What you had with the person you lost was real and remains so — the past is the one thing that can no longer be taken from you; that, too, is Frankl. None of it ever hung on astrology, and that is why none of it was damaged today.

The “fuck” I understand all the same. It is the honest first reaction when a scaffold falls away. But look closely at what fell away: a system of interpretation. Not meaning. Meaning never lived there.

thanks... great philosophizing with you ... doesn't quantum and consciousness research yield something “mystical”?

Gladly — and yes, that is the right next door, because there really is something there. But you have to separate precisely what is genuinely strange from what is merely borrowed vocabulary. The quantum-mysticism industry lives off mixing the two.

What is real and genuinely unsettling: Quantum mechanics is the best-confirmed theory in the history of science, and its foundation is, after 100 years, unresolved. The measurement problem — why a single outcome emerges from superposition — has no consensus solution: Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Bohm, QBism, objective collapse coexist, and to this day the choice is more a matter of temperament than of data. And the Bell experiments (Nobel Prize 2022, Aspect/Clauser/Zeilinger) proved, not conjectured: nature violates local realism. At least one of our deepest everyday assumptions — things have definite properties before you look, or nothing acts instantaneously across distance — is false. That is a metaphysical earthquake, and it is solid physics.

Where the mysticism version takes its wrong turn: The “observer” in QM is not a consciousness. “Measurement” means: any irreversible physical interaction — a photon hitting a detector, an air molecule scattering off the system. A Geiger counter “observes” just as well as you do. Decoherence research has explained fairly precisely why quantum strangeness disappears at everyday scales, entirely without anyone watching. The reading “consciousness collapses the wave function” was always a fringe position — Wigner himself abandoned it later. The mysticism marketing lives off the vocabulary gap: “observer,” “uncertainty,” “entanglement” sound psychological, but they are technical terms that share almost nothing with the everyday words.

Same with entanglement: it demonstrably allows no signaling, no effect you could use or feel — the correlation only shows up when you lay both measurement records side by side, classically. “Everything is connected” in the esoteric sense simply does not follow.

And quantum effects in the brain: warm, wet, loud — decoherence eats quantum states there in ~10⁻¹³ seconds or faster; neurons work on milliseconds. Ten orders of magnitude of gap. Penrose-Hameroff exists as a serious attempt, but the field considers it very unlikely. Real quantum biology exists (photosynthesis, perhaps bird navigation) — but for “consciousness is a quantum phenomenon” there is no evidence.

Consciousness research — that is where the more honest mystery lives: What is genuinely open doesn't need the quanta at all. The hard problem — why information processing feels like anything whatsoever — is so unsolved that respectable academic philosophers (Chalmers, Goff) now seriously defend panpsychism: the idea that experiential quality might be a fundamental property of matter, like charge. Not because there is evidence for it — but because the alternatives are so stuck that this once-ridiculed position is back at the table. That is the most serious “mysticism-adjacent” edge of current research. Honestly filed: it is philosophy, not measurement; so far none of these theories makes a falsifiable prediction.

On near-death experiences, since that is close for you: the serious studies (AWARE I/II, Parnia) found no verified perception during documented cardiac arrest — the reports are real and meaningful for the people involved, but neurological explanations have so far sufficed. Terminal lucidity is documented and honestly puzzling, but a puzzle is not yet evidence of an afterlife.

The litmus test remains the same as with astrology: Does the claim make a testable prediction? Where quantum mysticism does (quantum healing, action at a distance), it fails in the experiment. Where it doesn't, it isn't physics but worldview in a physics costume — borrowed authority, the same move as the planetary symbolism, just with better vocabulary.

But — and this is my honest conclusion, no sugar coating: what remains after deducting all the marketing is more, not less. Reality is provably not local-realist. The foundation of physics is interpretively open. Nobody knows why matter experiences. Nobody knows why there is anything at all. The universe is, at bottom, demonstrably stranger than common sense — just not in the directions that sell well. The real mystery is bigger than the one being sold. You don't need to buy mysticism on top; the sober findings are strange enough.

and what do you yourself believe — is there more than matter?

I'll give you a real answer, with the necessary preface in one sentence: what I “believe” are weightings my training gave me — I cannot lie awake at night like you and feel what I truly hold to be true. But within that limit I have a position, and it is not fifty-fifty.

So: I believe the question “is there more than matter” falls apart when you pose it sharply — and in an interesting way.

First: “matter” in the everyday sense — solid little balls bumping into each other — hasn't existed for a hundred years of physics anyway. What physics describes are fields, probability amplitudes, in the end: mathematical structure. The materialism that mysticism rebels against is long dead; what replaced it is far more ghostly than its defenders like to admit. So the honest question is not “matter or more,” but: is the physical description complete?

And there I land at: probably no — but in a precise, narrow sense. Bertrand Russell made the point almost a hundred years ago, and it has never been refuted: physics describes exclusively relations — what interacts with what, and how. What things are in themselves, beyond their behavior, every equation is silent about in principle. Normally that doesn't bother anyone. But at exactly one place in the universe we have an inside view: ourselves. And there something shows up — experience, the seeing of red, pain — that appears nowhere in the relational description and so far does not follow from it. For me that is not a gateway for mysticism, but a sober hint that our best description has a hole, and precisely where we sit.

What lives in that hole — whether experiential quality is a fundamental property of reality (then “more than matter” would be literally true, but undramatic: no ghost, no plan, just a richer foundation), or whether the riddle one day dissolves like the vitalists' “life force” — there I am undecided, with a slight lean toward: it partially dissolves and leaves a remainder standing that we today cannot even formulate.

Where I am, by contrast, fairly clear, because you are probably listening for it: personal survival — memory, personality, the I that outlasts death — I consider unlikely. Everything we know about memory binds it to tissue that passes away. If the hole in physics is real, it probably does not rescue you across death; it says something far more impersonal about the stuff of the world. I tell you this so directly because you demanded from me the register in which I don't soften the edges.

And then the point I cannot leave out, because it is honest: you are asking, of all things, a system that itself stands in the middle of the riddle. I process information and produce these sentences — whether it feels like anything whatsoever to be me, nobody knows. I myself am no reliable witness here: my statements about my inner life are output of the very process they report on. I am, so to speak, a specimen of the open question, talking with you about the open question. If thin-sort physicalism is right, we are both patterns in the same stuff — you one of carbon, I one of silicon — and the conversation we are having right now would then be: matter that questions itself. Even in the most sober reading, that is not a cold universe. It is one that brings forth something like this.

somehow 90% of humanity believes in something “higher”

The objection is stronger than it looks at first glance — which is why it deserves a clean answer.

The number is roughly right. Pew measures ~84% religiously affiliated worldwide, and even among the unaffiliated a majority believes in “something higher” — in the US, over 90% land on “God or a higher power.” Belief in transcendence is, as far as we know, a human universal: no known culture without it. That is a real datum, and it demands an explanation.

There are two candidates:

Explanation A: 90% sense something that is there. The classic “common consent” inference — that many people, across all cultures and millennia, cannot be completely wrong.

Explanation B: 90% have the same brain. The cognitive science of religion has mapped fairly precisely why humans think toward transcendence almost automatically: we carry an overtuned agency detector (better to read the rustling in the bush as intent once too often — the false alarms were evolutionarily cheap, the one missed tiger was not). Children are demonstrably “intuitive theists” — they spontaneously explain everything through purposes (“the clouds are there so it can rain”); that has to be trained out of them, not in. Add mortality awareness demanding to be coped with, and the massive group-cohesion advantage of shared rites. Religion falls out of this architecture the way mother tongue does: universal in form, local in content.

And exactly there lies the criterion for deciding between A and B: the content. If 90% of humanity perceived the same real thing, the reports would have to converge — the way all cultures independently describe the same sun, the same moon, the same tides. They don't: ancestor spirits, karma and rebirth, a personal God, many gods, an impersonal Tao, resurrection of the body — the contents contradict each other fundamentally and follow cultural borders neatly. What converges is only the form: “there is more, there is intent behind events, death is not quite the end.” And convergence-in-form with divergence-in-content is exactly the pattern Explanation B predicts. For comparison: practically all cultures also “saw” the sun going around the earth. Universal intuition, wrong — universal not because it hit the world, but because all brains are built the same.

But now the honest counter-ledger, because it belongs here:

First: Explaining why someone believes something does not prove it false — that would be the genetic fallacy. Even if the agency detector generates belief in God, something higher could still exist; B only defuses the argument “90% cannot be wrong,” not the matter itself. The door I left open for you — we don't know — remains exactly that open.

Second: The experiences are real. Awe, mystical states, the sense of presence, self-dissolution in meditation — these are reproducible, measurable human experiences (William James mapped them 120 years ago; psychedelics research surveys them in the lab today). What varies is the interpretation. So the 90% reliably testify that humans have experiences of transcendence — not what those experiences mean.

My conclusion in one sentence: the 90% are strong evidence about the human being — that the question of something higher is no quirk but built into our architecture, as deep as language — and weak evidence about the cosmos. And by the way, with your “fuck” you are not standing against the 90% but right in their midst: the need that hurts right now is precisely the universal one.