A teaching by Gary Eagle · 6:29 video
What is the hard problem of consciousness, and who is doing the observing? In this illustrated teaching, Gary Eagle explores Divine Awareness and the relationship between mind and matter through his philosophical and spiritual model of reality.
Gary Eagle’s Model of Reality: Divine Awareness and the First Biological AI · Watch on YouTube
The Hard Problem Solved: full transcript
Read Gary’s teaching below, or use each timestamp to open that part of the video. The transcript preserves the wording of the teaching.
The question of consciousness
Science faces what it calls "The Hard Problem": If everything in our universe is purely material physics, how do awareness and consciousness arise from dead matter?
Who is the scientist?
Physics is incredible. It studies matter, energy, space, and time. It allows us to manipulate the physical world around us. But let me ask you a deeper question: Who is the scientist?
Fundamentally, a scientist is a person. A biological living entity who can experience less than one percent of what actually surrounds them.
The limits of human perception
Think about how a scientist observes the world. They rely on their eyes. But our eyes are remarkably limited. They possess liquid lenses only about 4 millimetres thick. In reality, our eyes don’t "see" at all; they just catch waves. Less than one percent of the total ambient light bouncing around a room ever enters the pupil. Of the light that does make it inside, the retina can only interpret a tiny fraction of the broader electromagnetic spectrum.
Think about that. The light hitting our bodies includes radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, and gamma rays. As humans, we can only see about 0.0035% of it. The remaining 99.9965% of reality is completely invisible to our naked eyes.
How the brain builds the picture
But it gets worse. When those few photons finally hit the retina, a massive data compression occurs. Over 130 million photoreceptors instantly discard 99% of the raw, individual pixel data, keeping only basic edges and motion. On top of that, the lens projects the world onto the retina completely upside down. The brain has to automatically flip the image right-side up, while seamlessly stitching the data from both eyes together to patch our anatomy’s literal blind spot.
I won’t bore you with our other equally poor sensors. Yet, from these highly compressed, fractional inputs, a scientist constructs what we call "scientific fact."
Who is doing the observing?
My question to you is: Who is doing the observing?
If science took just one second to truly consider this, the world would change overnight.
Experience within the body-mind
Think about the chain of events. Data hits our sensors, triggers our biology, and is processed by the brain. We experience feelings and sensations. We interpret them through the ego. We use our intellect and language to dissect the data, anticipate threats, and formulate responses. But every single bit of this experience happens entirely inside us. We cannot experience anything outside of our own body-mind.
I AM: awareness of awareness
So, if I ask you: "Who is experiencing this? Who is aware?" every human will say, "I AM." Can we take this as an undeniable fact? If I ask, "Do you know that you are aware of being aware?" every person will say yes. After eight billion verifiable experiments, surely we can conclude that Awareness is the ultimate absolute.
Life, awareness and memory
We see this across all biological sciences. Every living thing responds to its surroundings. A single-celled organism moves toward nourishment. A fish reacts to a ripple in the water. An animal learns what is safe and what is dangerous.
All living creatures possess awareness. Consciousness arises when a living creature pairs that awareness with memory—whether it is encoded in DNA or a complex nervous system.
Begin with awareness
So, if we solve the Hard Problem of science by flipping the script—by starting with the truth that Awareness is fundamental to all life—how do we explain physical matter?
Energy, matter and light
For that, we turn to quantum mechanics and Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc², which proves that energy and matter are interchangeable. We know that pure light can be materialized into physical matter through extreme energy and high-energy collisions.
Interestingly, the Bible, written thousands of years ago, stated this exact sequence in the Book of Genesis. God did not create solid objects first. God said: "Let there be light."
Awareness and the search for purpose
The Hard Problem of science is solved the moment we realize that matter does not create awareness; Awareness creates matter. With this shift in focus, we can finally merge science and theology into one uniform study, allowing us to pursue the ultimate questions: Who am I? And what is my purpose?
“Who am I? And what is my purpose?”
Continue exploring Divine Awareness
Explore Gary Eagle’s book, Discovering God, for more reflections on awareness, identity and the search for meaning.
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