Our brains are amazing – what is their connection with The Universe?

Our brains are awesome and powerful in ways that we can only guess at. We know less about our brains than what happens on the far side of the moon.

Elon Musk wants to wire them up to devices that will help disabled people to become less disabled. Which, in itself, sounds great and exciting but some scientists are pretty sceptical.

Mainly they are sceptical because of Musk’s track record – he has form when it comes to making big promises and then under-delivering. They also worry about a commercial organisation coming up with these kinds of ground-breaking developments.

“What is next?” they wonder. Our brains controlling our Tesla cars? Or being hard wired into our Starlink internet (surely, metaverse) settings?.

Whatever happens with Mr Musk and his Neuralink plans, there is a new impetus to discover more about our brains.

One scientist in the UK has ‘posited’ the theory that our brains are a simple but heady combination of physical matter and an electromagnetic field which together form consciousness, the brain’s energy field.

This theory sounds simplistic but quite compelling.

It is, of course, just one theory. Other theories exist and have been around for years. Our mind is a separate entity, our brains are linked to each other at some subconscious level, causing historical coincidences such as things and theories being developed at around the same time in different parts of the world (this is obviously before instant communication).

The extrapolation of the theory that says our brains are connected with other brains is that our brains are part of the Universe itself.

This could mean that we are part of the computer programme trying to work out the Big Question, as ‘posited’ by Douglas Adams in his five book trilogy (he has apologized for his bad maths) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

All of this sounds pretty outrageous (although the thought that Douglas Adams was right does give a thrill of pleasure), but maybe that theory is on the right lines.

Maybe someone or something cracked the Big Problem of AI that truly learns, adapts and acts on ‘instinct’ and experience. Already scientists are seriously discussing whether the Universe is a machine that keeps learning. Or that the Universe is one big neural network.

Either way, it is either cool or scary to think that our brains, our puny, little understood human brains are the AI in the experiment called The Universe.