Consciousness all the way down?

The next trailblazing horizons for science?

Excerpt: "Almost a century after the paradigm shift caused by Nicolas Copernicus’s radical suggestion that the Earth orbits the Sun, our scientific grasp of the universe was once again revolutionized when the proverbial apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head. Newton opened our eyes to a deeper reality when he described gravity as a pervasive force with laws that govern the attraction of objects in motion.

Albert Einstein then came along and ignited yet another mind-blowing paradigm shift for humanity to grapple with. Einstein described gravity not as a force, but as a warping of four-dimensional spacetime where spacetime is the fabric of the universe.

Once more, humanity was afforded a slightly more accurate window onto the universe.

Driven by relentless curiosity, scientists have arrived at an even deeper understanding of the fundamental nature of reality through the discovery of quantum mechanics, and another paradigm shift is now underway. Regardless of which interpretation of quantum mechanics, or theory of quantum gravity, physicists subscribe to, one thing physicists seem to agree on at this point is that space itself (in any number of dimensions) cannot be fundamental and must emerge out of a deeper structure.

Just as the color green doesn’t exist “out there” but is how our brains represent a light wavelength perceived by the retina, our perception of space probably isn’t “out there” either (at least not in the way we have been led to believe).

The three-dimensional space we experience is yet another way our brains create a map of the underlying reality, but again, our experience often gives us a very different sense of what the structure in nature we’re perceiving actually is. So there are some fascinating questions fundamental physics currently faces. If space isn’t a fundamental aspect of the universe, what is giving rise to this domain we call space in the first place?

And will understanding a more fundamental layer of reality help us explain not only what space is, but why we detect the apparent paradoxes of superposition, non-locality, and entanglement at the quantum scale in spacetime?