by Mekel Haunsby 24-7-2026
( Læs artiklen på dansk her )
A speculative look at reality, consciousness, and the odds of how we got here
Most of us move through the day treating the physical world as solid, independent, and older than mind. Gravity pulls, objects resist, DNA replicates, and brains generate awareness as a late evolutionary add-on. That picture has delivered extraordinary practical power. Yet it leaves several stubborn puzzles sitting in plain sight. What if we turn the order around for a moment and ask a different question?
What if the physical world is not the foundation but the sustained outcome of agreement among countless conscious observation points? What if the “laws of nature” function less like unbreakable code written into the cosmos and more like the house rules of a very long-running cooperative game? And what if the programming language of that game is not binary or quantum bits, but the quiet, continuous consensus of the players themselves?
This is offered strictly as a “what if” thesis—an invitation to explore, not a claim of proof. It is written for three overlapping audiences: those drawn to spiritual traditions, those already intrigued by simulation hypotheses, and those who prefer the disciplined caution of materialist science. The goal is simply to lay out the idea clearly, show what it organizes, give the opposing view its due, and then ask, on purely mathematical grounds of explanatory reach and foundational probability, which picture currently carries the lighter load.
The Core Idea in Everyday Language
Picture a vast number of aware points of view that have been interacting for immense stretches of time. Over those stretches they settled on a shared set of constraints so that experience could be coherent, challenging, and fair. Solid matter, consistent causality, and fixed physical constants became the agreed playing field. Once the field was established, most participants gradually stopped reaching for the deeper levers that could rewrite the rules mid-game. Doing so felt like cheating. After enough repetitions the inhibition became nearly automatic—much the way an experienced sports player no longer considers picking up the ball with their hands even when the referee is not looking.
Spiritual or anomalous capacities are therefore not absent; they are inhibited by long habit and by the mutual expectation that the game should be played within the agreed limits. When the inhibition is briefly relaxed—usually under intense conviction or extreme circumstance—the rules can appear to bend. The rest of the time the consensus holds, and the world feels reliably physical.
This framing sits surprisingly close to the popular “we live in a simulation” intuition that has grown in recent years. The difference is only in the nature of the code. Instead of an external programmer writing lines of digital instruction, the programming language is the ongoing spiritual agreement of the participants themselves. The matrix, on this view, is not imposed from outside; it is collectively maintained from within.
A further refinement is possible. What if the many individual viewpoints are not ultimately separate, but differentiated expressions of a single source of observation—linked at root, like facets of one field of awareness? Apparent multiplicity would then be a local agreement within an underlying unity. This idea resonates with certain readings of quantum theory: entanglement demonstrates non-local correlation, and some interpretations (participatory universe ideas associated with Wheeler, or consciousness-related approaches to measurement) treat observation as more than a passive physical event. The consensus thesis is compatible with those readings but is not required by standard quantum mechanics. Most working physicists treat quantum phenomena as fully physical; the single-source proposal remains a philosophical overlay rather than a deduction from the mathematics of quantum theory. It aligns more cleanly with nondual spiritual frameworks than with purely physicalist ones.
Two Simple Illustrations
Consider the common report of memory loss between lives. Under the consensus model this need not be a design flaw. It can function as a protective agreement. Full recollection of every prior participation would flood the current game with overwhelming context, making fresh engagement nearly impossible. Forgetting becomes a kindness—an agreed filter that lets each new round begin with appropriate intensity and freedom. Whether one calls it protective mechanism or mutual contract, the effect is the same: continuity of identity without crippling continuity of detail.
A second illustration concerns the gradual disappearance of overt spiritual powers. Imagine a competitive arena in which every player possesses the latent ability to freeze an opponent’s systems or lock their own position so that no force can move them. Using those abilities wins the match instantly—but ends the contest for everyone. Over countless rounds the group develops a shared understanding: such moves are unacceptable because they break the fairness that makes the game worth playing. After eons the inhibition is so thoroughly internalized that most players no longer even notice the capacity is still there. What looks like the absence of power is, on this account, the presence of deep consensus about how the game should be conducted.
Both examples are deliberately ordinary. They require no special pleading; they simply follow from treating physical law as sustained agreement rather than as metaphysical bedrock.
Alignment with Religious Tenets
The thesis finds partial to strong resonance across a wide range of religious and contemplative traditions, though the fit is never total.
In many Hindu and Advaita streams the world is sustained play (lila) or appearance (maya) within a single awareness; individual souls temporarily forget their source in order to participate. The consensus model echoes this closely: agreement maintains the field, forgetting protects the game, and powers remain latent. Buddhist interdependent origination and the doctrine that phenomena lack inherent self-existence likewise sit comfortably with a reality held in place by mutual relation rather than by independent material substance. Certain Mahayana and Yogācāra emphases on mind as primary map even more directly.
Abrahamic traditions align more selectively. The idea that the world is spoken or willed into being, and continually sustained by divine attention, shares the theme of reality-as-agreement, now centered on a primary source rather than distributed consensus. Miracles appear as localized suspensions of ordinary order by higher will or intense faith—structurally similar to the conviction-driven exceptions in the model. Free will within a constrained creation also parallels the fair-play inhibition. Strict dualisms that treat matter as fully independent of mind, or afterlife doctrines that locate all significance beyond the physical game, fit less well.
Indigenous and animist worldviews, in which the landscape and its creatures participate in ongoing relational agreements, find near-direct correspondence. Gnostic and Hermetic strands that describe the material realm as a constructed or consensual veil likewise resonate.
In short, the thesis overlaps substantially with nondual, idealist, and relational strands of religion, partially with theistic accounts of sustained creation, and more weakly with purely transcendental or material-independent dualisms. It does not replace any tradition; it simply offers a contemporary philosophical bridge that many of them can recognize.
What the Thesis Organizes
If the physical world is consensus rather than brute fact, a range of otherwise scattered observations fall under one mechanism:
- The rarity of dramatic anomalies and their frequent link to moments of strong conviction.
- Cross-cultural reports of unity or mystical states as temporary thinning of the ordinary perceptual filter.
- Persistent accounts of past-life memory that sometimes carry specific later-verified detail.
- Synchronicities and sudden skill that appear to bypass ordinary learning.
- The observation that genuine belief often tracks more closely with reported intentional effects than skeptical performance does.
- The problem of suffering as the cumulative result of many small, conflicting micro-decisions rather than a single cosmic defect.
- The stability of physical constants as statistically settled outcomes of repeated agreement.
- Modular neurological deficits as interruptions in the biological interface that filters or transmits awareness, not as the destruction of awareness itself.
In each case the same two elements—ongoing consensus plus deeply habituated inhibition—do the explanatory work.
The Materialist Case, Fairly Stated
A careful materialist reply deserves equal space. Physics, chemistry, and evolutionary biology have an unmatched record of precise prediction and technological success. The standard model of particle physics, the periodic table, and the mechanisms of natural selection are not speculative; they are daily tools. Neuroscience continues to map correlations between brain states and reported experience with increasing resolution. On the origin of life, research programs exploring RNA-world chemistry, autocatalytic networks, and membrane-bound proto-cells remain active. While no complete pathway from non-living chemistry to a self-replicating, information-bearing system has yet been demonstrated under early-Earth conditions, the absence of a finished demonstration is not proof that none exists. Given sufficient time, volume, and chemical diversity, low-probability events can still occur. Many working scientists therefore treat the remaining gaps as technical challenges rather than fundamental barriers, and they note that invoking prior consciousness simply relocates the explanatory problem one step further back.
That stance is conservative in the best sense: it refuses to multiply entities beyond those required by laboratory data. It has earned its authority through repeated, independent verification. Any alternative thesis must acknowledge that strength.
Is There a Necessary Contrast, or Are the Two Approaches Mergeable?
At first glance the pictures can seem opposed: either physical laws are fundamental and consciousness is a late product, or consciousness is primary and the laws are sustained agreement. Yet the apparent contrast may dissolve once we look more carefully—especially if the question of ultimate origin is set to one side.
Under the consensus thesis the physical laws, once agreed upon, are completely solid. Gravity does not become optional. Chemical reactions do not hesitate. The speed of light remains fixed. Every regularity that science measures, models, and engineers continues to hold with undiminished reliability. Laboratory work proceeds exactly as before. The scientific method remains the most powerful tool we have for mapping the agreed-upon rules of the game. The thesis does not soften or relativize those rules; it simply offers a possible account of why they are so steadfast and why most participants experience them as inviolable.
If we extract the origin-of-life and origin-of-consciousness questions from the immediate comparison, the two frameworks become largely complementary rather than competitive. One can adopt a thoroughly scientific approach to every physical process while simultaneously recognizing a deeper dimension in which awareness and mutual agreement underwrite the stability of the field. Nothing in the day-to-day practice of physics, chemistry, or biology needs to change. The spiritual recognition supplies a coherent context for the otherwise unexplained solidity of the rules and for the residual capacities that occasionally surface when conviction overrides the habitual inhibition.
In this light the thesis does not ask anyone to abandon scientific rigor. It allows a complete, uncompromising scientific engagement with physical law alongside a deep spiritual recognition that the order we study may itself be the expression of sustained consensus among conscious agents. The methods stay the same; the possible meaning expands. Whether one ultimately finds this dual stance satisfying is a personal matter, but the logical space for it is open.
The Mathematical Weakness at the Origin of DNA and Self-Preservation
The difficulty can be stated more precisely. A functional protein of only 150 amino acids has 20^150 possible sequences—approximately 10^195 candidates. Even under extremely generous assumptions about the number of trials available on the early Earth (every atom in the oceans attempting a new combination every possible molecular timescale across hundreds of millions of years), the searchable fraction of that space remains vanishingly small. Functional folds occupy an exceedingly sparse subset of the possibilities. Worse, the problem is not the appearance of one lucky polymer. For information to persist, the same system must simultaneously achieve reliable replication, a degree of error correction, and a mapping that recognizes which sequences possess utility and preserves them against degradation. The modern genetic code and its translation machinery are themselves made of proteins and RNA whose sequences are specified by nucleic acids—creating a profound interdependency. Selection can act only on systems that already replicate with sufficient fidelity and already possess some sequence-to-function mapping. Chance must therefore produce, in coordinated fashion, both the informational polymer and the self-preserving interpretive system that gives that information durable meaning. No demonstrated prebiotic pathway currently closes this loop without importing the very functional complexity it seeks to explain. The mathematical burden is not merely the low probability of a single complex molecule; it is the joint probability of an interdependent package of information, replication, and recognition arising together from non-informational chemistry.
Mathematical Plausibility: Counting Assumptions and Coverage
Strip away preference and ask two narrow questions. First, how many distinct classes of reported phenomena does each framework bring under a single coherent mechanism? Second, at the foundation, how many steps of extreme combinatorial improbability does each framework require?
Materialism currently explains the regularities of physics and chemistry with impressive economy. It struggles, however, at the threshold where non-informational chemistry must give rise to a system that both stores digital information and possesses machinery capable of recognizing and preserving the functional utility of that information. In addition, consciousness itself must emerge from non-conscious matter—an explanatory step whose probability remains undefined because the transition has never been observed or derived.
The consensus-agreement thesis begins with awareness as given. It therefore does not need to generate informational utility or consciousness from their opposites. Physical law, biological complexity, and the inhibition of direct powers all arise as consequences of prolonged interaction and mutual constraint among already-aware participants. The same mechanism that stabilizes the physical constants also accounts for the pattern of anomalies, the filtering of memory between lives, and the deep-seated reluctance to break the shared rules. On the narrow metric of foundational probability plus breadth of phenomena brought under one roof, the thesis carries fewer ultra-low-probability leaps and covers a wider set of observations.
That comparison is not a verdict. It is an extrapolation from the criteria stated: number of phenomena organized and mathematical cost at the origin. Laboratory science will continue to operate under materialist assumptions because those assumptions remain the most constrained and predictive within the physical domain we can measure. The speculative thesis remains useful precisely because it keeps the foundational questions visible and invites sharper tests—while still permitting a fully scientific engagement with the solid, agreed-upon laws that govern ordinary experience.
Whether one ultimately prefers the conservative discipline of materialism, the elegant recursion of a simulation written in spiritual agreement, a clean merger of the two, or some hybrid still to be formulated, the exercise itself has value. It reminds us that the most familiar picture of reality is still a picture—and that asking “what if” with care can illuminate both the strengths and the silent costs of the stories we currently tell.
