My posting of this stuff here is prompted by a desire for dialog. I've been at this search for my entire life, now 85 years — attempting to harmonize a marriage of philosophy and science. Questions are invited. Illumination is the goal. I apologize for any and all obscurities, inconsistencies, ignorance.

OPG: Are you saying we are none of us "doers", and that everything is controlled by our genes and the STHTU?

I was pointing to the attribution of 'doership' to an inert remembered self-image. To be clear, the self-image does serve as a reservoir of conditioning, the residue of past experience. As such, referencing the self-image clearly influences ongoing processes of attention, recognition, anticipation, expression, remembrance, and so forth. The problem, as I see it, arises when this inert selectively remembered and recollected self-image is attributed status as a decision-maker, or 'doer' if you will, when its appropriate role is to serve as a repository of undigested experience that warrants critical examination. This introduces a noise factor evoking undigested experience in lieu of the silent awareness accompanying effective negotiation of the infinite possibilities of erstwhile nothingness.

This brings to mind the remarkable attentionally focused ‘zone’ of awareness that’s widely reported by athletes. The zone reveals an extremity in the widely ranging scope of all-encompassing perception.

The ‘zone’ seems to heighten perceptual acuity while narrowing the field of attention, as is evident in a baseball batter being able to discern the seams on a ball approaching the plate at a hundred miles per hour; a ball that appears to casual onlookers as a mere blur. This silencing of the mind allows time-dilation: an apparent slowing of the passage of time accompanied by enhanced perception of the details of the objects of attention.

Inappropriate attribution of doership to an image of the self is exacerbated by linguistic customs such as the common assertion that 'I am doing [whatever]', where 'I' refers to a recollection of oneself drawn from within remembrance. This tends to expose the innate capacity for effective silent initiative to the noise of undigested past experience.

As for my being "a 'universal consciousness' guy", I don't assert that the universe will cease to exist upon my death or the demise of humanity. What I do believe is that the universe, which includes us (and our perceptions), is underpinned with boundless ephemerally flickering virtually atemporal quarks and gluons. I'm persuaded of this by the vast array of well-confirmed observations supporting the Standard Model of particle physics and Quantum Field Theory (QFT). Yes, it's a 'belief', as is any theory, despite being backed by the most assiduous scientific inquiry.

My speculation is mostly prompted by the hundred-year failure of science to reconcile QFT with General Relativity (GR). Despite scientists' most ardent effort, QFT fails to accommodate the force of gravity — the essence of GR and spacetime; the orientation of human perception.

I suspect the problem stems from an anthropomorphic conception of temporal experience. We regard peering into space as looking back in time, implying that our physical environment is a past impression. I wonder about certain inconsistencies in this view.

For example, we're visually informed of our vast quantum to cosmic environment by photons which undergo no change between emission and absorption, and thus entail no passage of time — that's how they convey information about their source. The only detectable change in photons is their wavelength; correlating with 'in transit' spacetime expansion. I put that in quotes because this redshift is the only evidence of their purported journey.

Couple that with the fact that our observable universe comprises only about 5% of the total matter and energy of the universe at large. The rest is thought to be about one third dark matter and two thirds dark energy, where 'dark' refers to an absence of understanding. Dark matter is proposed to account for gravitational effects that are unwarranted by observable matter in GR. Dark energy is proposed to account for otherwise theoretically inexplicable spacetime expansion.

I'm inclined to regard the whole thing as complexifying possibilities atemporally emergent within the infinite potential of erstwhile nothingness. Emergent complexity rooted in ephemeral quarks is at once experienced as the ubiquitous becoming of individual existence and as a boundlessly evolving cosmic environment.

unquarked

[While I'm neither a physicist nor a mathematician, the many perplexing zeros and infinities encountered throughout fundamental physical theorizing strike me as significant.]