Thread by @newscientist

To make sense of quantum theory and the passage of time, physicists are radically rethinking the relationship between matter and mind newscientist.com/article/mg2543…

A walk in the woods. Every shade of green. A fleck of rain. The sensations and thoughts bound in every moment of experience feel central to our existence

But physics, which aims to describe the universe and everything in it, says nothing about your inner world

It can seem as if there is an insurmountable gap between our subjective experience of the world and our attempts to objectively describe it.

Yet our brains are made of matter – so, you might think, the states of mind they generate must be explicable in terms of states of matter

The question is: how?

And if we can’t explain consciousness in physical terms, how do we find a place for it in an all-embracing view of the universe?

“There is no question in science more difficult and confusing,” says Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the @Perimeter in Waterloo, Canada

It is also one that he and others are addressing with renewed vigour, convinced that we will never make sense of the universe’s mysteries, unless we reimagine the relationship between matter and mind

Their ideas amount to an attempt to describe the universe from the inside out, rather than the other way around, and they might force us to abandon assumptions about what everything is made of

Tap to learn more for New Scientist's #Consciousness week: newscientist.com/article/mg2543…