My Cautious Attitude Towards Modern Physics

I remain very cautious about some of the theories, hypotheses and conclusions of modern physics, and to a certain extent I am sceptical of them. This does not mean that black holes, the Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy, or ideas such as negative energy must be wrong. Nor does it mean denying the extraordinary achievements of modern physics. My concern is that many of these concepts first emerged when existing theories encountered gaps or tensions with observation. They were proposed in order to preserve the coherence of a theoretical framework. Observations, experiments and calculations may later lend support to them, but such support is usually conditional and bounded by uncertainty. It often establishes that a model works within a certain range, rather than proving that we have grasped the final structure of reality itself. Dark matter and dark energy are especially clear examples. They arose because present theories could not account for certain observations. Something not yet understood may indeed exist, but whether it exists in the form we currently imagine remains an open question.

What concerns me is the tendency to turn an explanatory model that works under particular conditions into a settled claim about the nature of the universe. Human beings do not observe the universe from outside it. Everything we see is mediated by our senses, instruments, mathematics, language and consciousness. We keep extending outward from within a framework limited by our own biological conditions and cognitive structures. The external world certainly exists and can certainly be understood with increasing precision, but no act of knowing can be separated entirely from the knower.

For this reason, I increasingly feel that the exploration of the universe should not be only an outward expansion. It should also return to the most basic boundaries of human capacity. What is consciousness? Why does consciousness arise? Why do human beings have the impulse to explore, question, understand and exceed themselves? These may be among the questions we need to confront most seriously. Our investigation of the external world is, in the end, driven by this internal and somewhat strange force. We keep hypothesising, describing, testing and revising our picture of the universe not only because the universe is there, but because human beings cannot stop asking what kind of world they inhabit.

If we do not understand the human being as the instrument of observation, it is difficult to know what the objects observed by that instrument truly mean. When we observe a distant celestial body through a telescope, we can of course improve reliability through calibration, comparison and error analysis. But if we had no idea how much the telescope magnified, what distortions it introduced, or where its limits of resolution lay, how could we be confident about the object’s size, distance or shape? How much would belong to the object itself, and how much to the limits of the instrument? Consciousness is more complex than a telescope, because it is not merely a tool through which we observe the world. It is also a basic condition under which the world appears to us as a world at all. When consciousness studies consciousness, the difficulty is not only technical. It is also a fundamental structural limitation.

I am therefore not arguing that we should abandon the study of the universe. Rather, cosmology, physics and the study of consciousness should correct one another. Modern physics can show us how the world may operate within the range of present models and observations. The study of consciousness, human cognitive capacity and the conditions of human existence should remind us why those models arise in their particular form, how far they can reach, and where humility is necessary. A mature scientific attitude is neither easy belief nor simple rejection. It is the capacity to recognise the immense explanatory power of science while continuing to question the observer.